Shizu Hayashi, interviewed by Kyla Fitzgerald, 26 January 2017 Interviewee Shizu Hayashi Interviewee Ron Hunt Interviewer Kyla Fitzgerald Transcriber LOI Oral History Cluster Audio Checker Jennifer Landrey Final Checker Jennifer Landrey Encoder Lindy Marks Encoder Natsuki Abe

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Shizu Hayashi was born in Steveston shortly before internment began. In this interview, she discusses her memories of Kaslo, BC, Lemon Creek, BC, and Raymond AB where her family was forcibly uprooted to. She discusses the memories that have been shared with her about the family’s time in BC, including a discussion of a Kendo Club set up in Kaslo. She also shares her memories of returning to Steveston with her family in 1951, her professional career and post-graduate education, and the experience of travelling to Japan with her family in the 1970s.

This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.

 1940s, 1950-60s, 1970s Steveston Kaslo Lemon Creek Raymond Kendo Club Japan In situ hybridization Added navigation taxonomy value loiCollectionOralHistories using XSLT. Added relatedItem using XSLT. Using XSLT to clean up unwanted characters such as square brackets, and ellipses and converting kinesic and vocals to incident elements. Created file from loi_tr_hayashi_shizu.docx. So today is January 26th, 2017 and I am sitting here with Shizu Hayashi for a Landscapes of Injustice oral history interview. So thank you Shizu for sitting down with us today. You’re welcome. Really looking forward to it. I was wondering if we could start off with memories of your childhood. what you remember as a young child, some family history. Well, I can’t remember too much. Laughs.I guess I do remember Kaslo, so that’s the first place were interned to. Because I was born January the 11th. I can’t remember anything about. . .I know that I know—I don’t remember being there but my grandparents lived with us and we lived accordingly. I think it was called Landon Hotel. . .I know that because now it’s a museum. . .what’s it called? Pauses. Yeah the Langham Hotel, which is now the home of the Langham Cultural Society. So we lived there and I think there were a lot of other families because it was always sort of full. I was probably two to three or four years old. My sister was born there. Now I don’t remember my sister, but we have a pictures so I know my sister was born there. Kyla laughs.. I have two older brothers.Both laughs. I remember then. I remember my older brothers. They went to school. And I don’t remember too much, I remember – they used to take me to school with them. I think it was probably kindergarten that they went to because they would have been two years, two and three years older than me. And I had cousins who lived there, too. I don’t know why they were there. But anyway I remember going to school, so I would be by then probably three years old. Sort of arms up being taken to school because they were hanging on to me and I was probably didn’t walk very steadily and going to school with them. But I still remember my arms stretched out. And I remember once—I don’t know what I did there because I was too young, but I guess I was sort of being babysat, guess mother must have been busy or something. Anyway I didn’t go every day, I don’t think. But one time they had the school bell and there was this thing that all the kids were doing was jack jump over the candle stick and there was this school bell that they rang and the kids would do that because they were older than I was, and I couldn’t do it. And I then peed in my pants. And I remember that because after that peeing in my pants was a big problem. Laughs. Anyway, I remember that quite distinctly, it was, it was sort of painful. And the other thing I remember was that my cousin, who was the same age as me, she was born in November, the year before, and we were going to visit her at my grandmother’s. Now grandmother was my maternal grandma, we lived with my paternal grandparents. And we had to climb up the stairs because their little place that they lived in was upstairs of another house. And my mother. . .my grandmother, when we got to it as a present she would give us soramame. Do you know what soramame are? No. They are fava beans like, the Japanese call them soramame, may be sort of. . . Yeah. Maybe they are dialect, but the fava beans that are toasted. So they are hard. And so, you know, my grandmother what she used to do was she would eat one of these, crunch them all up and then she would give us that. And it was so good. But things like that I remember, but other. . .There was beach when we lived at Kootenay Lake in Kaslo—there was a beach and I remember sand between my toes, which I didn’t like. And I can show you some pictures though, Kaslo if you are interested in seeing. . . Yeah, for sure. Can I ask when you were in Kaslo, did you live, the building that you lived in that was on the beach, close to the beach itself? No, I don’t think so. Shizu tries to find a pictures on the computer. So that was the house we lived in. Oh, wow. And it’s two stories, maybe three stories high, and it did house several families ‘cause I remember a kitchen that was very busy. And that’s my grandma’s place, so these would be the stairs we climbed up. That was my grandmother, maternal grandmother, and I guess that’s my baby sister. And that’s my cousin, so she is the same age as I am. And here, that’s her, my aunt, my mom, my sister and my two brothers. And later on I’ll talk about Mr. Akune. He is the man of the Kendo club in Kaslo. And he is someone, one of the reasons why we went to Raymond, Alberta. That’s the lake. But that’s just taken because of the fact that, you know, it’s the picture, not that we lived by the lake. I think this was a different house, probably the front of the place where that my grandmother lived. I can’t see why we have a—that house in there. So that was Kaslo. The next place we went to was Lemon Creek. I think – I just had a book from my brother and I didn’t realize that Lemon Creek was such a big place because I have been there. I’ve been there twice now as an adult—well once as a teenager, once as an adult. And it’s just a flat field with some post settlement if you’ve ever been No, I’ve never been. But I got this, a book written about Slocan Valley. . . .it’s. . . this. Oh, isn’t this neat. This is part of this book. There was, I think. . . If you zoom in, did they give the names of each of the. . . Yeah. Oh my god. Searching on her computer. Where is the PowerPoint. . .I just want to move you. . .to . . .I just want to move that one to see how big the whole thing was in the end. This one goes up to house number...I don’t know. . .I will pan in later but. . .This map was made by a group that got together with the reunion of a lot of people who lived there in 1991, and the statistics show that there were between 1,800 and 1,700 people living there during this time from ’42 to ‘46 and I think we went there about ’44. So some people had already moved on. And they were also building all the time and this is the high school, now elementary school, so I go back to this. . . And I was asking my brothers because there is, I think, two Hayashi families that are on there. This is the Hayashi 1 and, zoom in you can see there. . . But my brother, my younger brother, who is two years older than me said that he went to school and we have pictures of them, went to kindergarten, and he said we lived by the school and by the bath house. And there were about three bathhouses here in this little settlement. Maybe there was even four. And there were different schools and there’s different churches. So I think this one—my friend, Joanne Sunahara, her family lived there from ’42 to ’46, so they stayed there all the time. When they came, this part of the settlement wasn’t built yet and she said that there was a Protestant church and there was a Buddhist church. She said they went to the Buddhist church and there was this church here. I wonder if I can bring that down a little bit here. . . Whereas my brother thought that we were at the. . . we lived over on this side, but there was a bathhouse here. And there was a high school over there, so he might have been mistaken. But he thought when he went to the kindergarten, it was in a school that was close by. And I don’t see a school there but there is a church there but talking to Joanne who is five years older than me, she said this church probably was a Buddhist church. And I know that there was a Buddhist church there because in Lemon Creek I have—I will show you the pictures of Lemon Creek. My brother went to a Japanese school, I mean a Japanese Language School and a Buddhist church. What I could remember myself, it’s sort of difficult to see, all I could remember was a bathhouse. The most vivid memories of Lemon Creek was this bathhouse that was huge and, you know, they took turns women and children and then men, and so on. It was steamy and you couldn’t see across the other side. Oh wow, that steamy. . . And it was a bit scary but I got used to it, I guess. And I don’t know how often we went, probably not, you know, not every night like good Japanese would do. Laughs. Anyway, that’s one thing I remember and I remember—and Joanne corroborates what I think—I remember walking up hills and she said on this side of the settlement was a hill that was denuded, and everything else was green around there. That was on the hills and we were talking about it the other day. And she says, Well maybe it was because they used timber for the houses. To build the houses. So do you want to see any more of this? Sort of shows you. . . Yeah, such a neat map. I’ve never seen anything like this. Direction to Slocan, which is North, which is South. So this is the bigger school ‘cause it housed hundreds of elementary type kids, whereas there weren’t too many in the high schools. Did you attend school in Lemon Creek yourself? No, because I would have have been three to four. Still young. Yeah, I don’t think we stayed that long. I think after this we went to Raymond and we were in Raymond, I don’t know, how many years ago. . . So it’s ’45 to ’46, we were probably were in Lemon Creek. The reason why I know that we were in Lemon Creek in ’45 was that my sister was a bit older from pictures and the kindergarten photo that we have there’s an actual date on it. Yes. And I don’t know where we had all these photos because I know that cameras were confiscated and weren’t allowed and only certain people could take pictures. I was going to ask, those photos that you just showed me are amazing. Yeah, I mean. . . Dad did have a friend who was a professional photographer. Maybe he was allowed to keep his camera and he got him to take pictures, otherwise some of them look quite professional anyways. So I don’t think it was brownie that they. . . Laughs. Anyway if we go back to pictures. . . did I get rid of it? Oh I know what it is. It’s behind here. Yes. This is Lemon Creek, so we can see what the buildings look like. They’re just shacks. And that’s my. . .I think I got. . . These are my grandparents of my paternal side and this is my brother’s kindergarten class. Can you imagine that big? And that’s the one that says it was ’45. Okay. And this is the Japanese Language School that my brother went to. And I know it’s Buddhist because a friend of mine’s father was Buddhist and he was the teacher, you know. I guess they took teachers from whoever could, in the community, who could teach. This is another one of the school. But you can see that, I think, this women up here, she is Caucasian and we have a close up of her with my brother. She was Caucasian. And I put this one in because my mother who was here and these three ladies, four ladies, four other ladies, they all went to school in Japan together. Oh, really? Yeah, this is all their kids except for the ones that are in school, my older brother and—Hiroko’s mom here had a son who was going to school so they are not in there. There were probably other older kids that aren’t in there. But—and this girl here is Hiroko. She just lives about four blocks away here, being good friends and we lived together in Steveston. She is a year younger. So we didn’t graduate together, though. She is not in that group of women I get together with. But we get together almost every week, go shopping and to the market and things like that and cycle, go on cycle groups together. You can see that there is a pile of wood there and I think if you blew this up there is a—actually there is a squash growing there. Oh yeah, now you can see. Oh yeah you can see them. So there is this big squash plant there. Looks like a huge one anyway. It’s interesting. Yeah, these photos are amazing. Yeah, I guess. . .I don’t know when they were allowed to take pictures, but definitely the fellow who was dad’s friend was a professional photographer and he’d have taken the pictures. But then when we moved to Alberta I guess you could have cameras by then. So some pictures—we didn’t—and his friend wasn’t around then. He was somewhere else, so/ That’s that one. . . These are really neat. So after that we went to Alberta. I don’t know if I remember a lot more about Alberta. Continues to click through photos on her computer. This is Mr. Akune there, the man I showed you later, who is the Kendo instructor with dad. And they were more from Kyushu and I think they probably were. . . I think they were more like from Kagoshima. So completely different sort of area from where we came from. But the commonality was Kendo, I guess. And they shared crops on this sugar beet farm near Raymond, Alberta. And I didn’t go to school there or even kindergarten there. There was, I think a Buddhist church, that we used to go to. My dad tended to be multi-denomination. He honoured his parents, you know, the Buddhists, but he was United Church and we went to both. So there was a big community in Raymond, too. So there was probably most of the Japanese who live there. That was my sister and I. My sister was always ravaged by insects’ bites. . .That’s another thing I remember. She always had patches on her because she’d be bitten all the time. What would she be bitten by? Oh you know mosquitoes, whatever, you know? She was very allergic, I guess. So it would. . .like most people. I—I still have allergies, like Ron says anybody who sits by me would never get an insect bite because they’ll come to me all the time. But she was worse. She was worse. That’s one of the things I do remember very distinctively. Poor Aya. And then after that I guess in . . .we located to. . . I guess we went to Alberta because you had to be East of the Rockies after I think ’45 or something? And then after ’46, I think you can come back but not to the coast. So we went to Westbank and that’s where I told you that my aunt had married a farmer. And they were, you know, both Japanese from the same villages but my aunt was quite bit younger. And they joined them in working the farm, my uncle worked for, I think it was Kelly Douglas was the name. They had a huge farm. It was both a fruit and vegetable farm so, you know, parents would plant tomatoes and I guess the usual vegetable crops and pick them. So we would—I remember helping mother at one point ‘cause I was now five going on six. And every now and then they would allow us to come out and especially when we were planting. And, you know, the job was to put the tomato, the seedlings, into the holes so they had created and they would take care of the rest of it. She wouldn’t let me do anything else but we used to be able to pick new dandelions and we would, actually use them like spinach, you know, something my. . . You know the spinach dish with shoyu and you sprinkle goma, that sort of thing. And they said, you know, I didn’t know spinach, but I remember sort of the first sort of after the soramame, the first—the other food that I remember that we had. And so it was like weeding the garden, picking up these new dandelions. And that’s when I went to school, had to learn English so that’s—this is the—you can call it the elementary school but this is the grades one, two, and three sign here. And this is my brother there. He is two years older than I was. And then the next year we went to grade two, and after we came to the coast in ’51. We came to the coast. My father used to work for Gulf of Georgia before internment. Oh wow, okay. And after he—they provided housing and I guess he was able to get some loans to get a boat. And we lived in the old Atagi Boatworks house. This was a secondary small building. The main boatworks was on this side and that this was a family home. And their office actually, the downstairs half of it was the office space for the boatworks. So it was left empty and hadn’t been looked after. So with a little fixing and that. . . But main thing I remember from this one—‘cause now, now I’m older, you know, remember a lot more—was that the office was amazing because they left all their papers. You know, all the. . .well I shouldn’t say papers, not the documents but the actual office type of stationary. Oh cool. So we would write grocery lists and there was a column for dollars. We would play store. Oh neat. But they probably had quite a thriving business. Now I am just wondering, are these buildings still up in Steveston? No, they came down with the new development. There is Garry Point, it’s sort of a park area? Okay, yeah. That’s what I thought, yeah. So most of the building, there was a stretch—it was interesting ‘cause Chathum Street is one over from the main street, one over from the river, and it came out at Scotch Pond. There was a little pond there that was used for mooring boats and there was a little wharf and things like that. And the Boatworks had a ramp that went down to the pond when they were launching new boats. And what I was going to say was that this Chathum Street after 7th Avenue which is the last main cross road. The road went out to the pond and along the road there were the cannery houses. And Gulf of Georgia owned most of it. And by then, I mean I think it would’ve been a sawmill or other things before, too. But there was one house at the very end that wasn’t Gulf of Georgia. It was Nelson Brothers or something—I can’t remember what it was. And so here would be all of us, sort of the little village of Mio-descendant and their whatevers, immigrants from there occupied about five or six houses and then this house on the other side of the river Shizu means to say road not river., the big one. And this one little house that was, the property was, belonged to Nelson Brothers, my brother would know for sure what it was, but was a Kagoshima family. Oh interesting. Yeah. And you know so we were almost whole relatives, you know, because we know each other from before and. . . Anyway it was sort of interesting because they—that was the first time I heard a different dialect in Japanese. And you know these people don’t speak like us. But they were very kind people, very nice people, and we got to know them. The families got together. There was no difference afterwards. We got to hear their language. The other thing was my—this house, it was a big house. So we lived there with my grandparents. And my aunt, one of my aunts on my mother’s side lived with us. She was the one, next to oldest, to my mother and her husband lived with us. And then as we—after we settled down, a cousin of mine moved in who was, he is in mid-80’s now, so he would be, what, ten years older than I was? And he—I guess he was helping fishing. And he probably fished on his own, too. But he moved in and then a cousin of my mother from Japan, had come back from Japan, and moved in with us. And my aunt took on a nephew. So we all lived in this house. There was this big kitchen with a big stove. And all the cooking was done in the kitchen. And my aunt had her little dining area, very small little dining area, really small. And we had a dining area and it was a big room. I guess it was original Boatworks’ dining room. And they had left their furniture there. So these chairs are from there. And— I was actually eyeing up— Pretty battered. . . I was eyeing up your chairs before like, Oh I really like the shape. So those chairs are from the house that— Yeah. Oh wow. Was left there, so they are pretty dilapidated. Ron’s been trying to fix them up ‘cause a lot of the joints are going. And there was a table there, a big dining table, you can put leaves in. And the one cousin of mine, my aunt, my mom’s was interested in playing ping-pong and he was really good and he was showing me some. And he said this is just the right size for, the correct size for the ping-pong. The only problem was the house was tilted a bit. It was, I guess built purposely maybe so it wouldn’t fall onto, there was this ditch along here, quite a big ditch. You know it was one of those ditches that it was used for flood control. Although a lot of the waste went in the ditch. So it was built up on the ditch side so it slanted a bit. You could tell when you poured shoyu that— Oh really? That’s funny. So when we would ping-pong, our saving grace was saying, Oh the house is tilted, that’s why we were not playing very well. We lived there until I was in my teens. And I don’t think my mother went to work in the cannery from here. That’s quite a distance you know a kilometre to walk to. Sorry to interrupt but did your family own this house or did they rent it. . .? No. I think it was—I don’t know if they even rented it whether the cannery just, you know, part of the joining of that cannery was. . . came with housing. I’m not sure. I didn’t get the sense that there was any rent. You know ‘cause all the up-keeps and things, we took care of ourselves. I can’t swear to that. But I think it was part of the deal of being part of that cannery. I think they did before the war too, you know they provided the housing. So your mother started working in the canneries during this time? Yes. And what cannery did she work for? Gulf of Georgia? No. She worked for—Gulf of Georgia wasn’t into big canning production then. They were doing fertilizers and other things, I can’t remember. But they definitely didn’t can those days. They probably did before the war. She went to work for Imperial Cannery which was on the other side of town. And I worked there too. You had to be 15 years old to work in canneries. So between the years something like 13 and 15, I went to—I actually went to back to Westbank. I worked summers on the fruits and vegetables and then, when you are—I think by the time I was 15, turned to 16, and I worked in those cannery for about two years until I was going to university. So you know the community was always closely knit. There was a United Church that my father went to. And there was a Buddhist Church. And once we were teenagers both churches had young people’s groups and we would get together, have nights together sort of thing. And there was a reasonable amount of community at that time. They would have Obon odoris together, they would have, I think, can’t remember when but it was in the winter sometime, but they would have an annual entertainment like, it was just local people who did shows, who sang, who did dances. And of course people would donate, you know how Japanese put up the name of the donors on the walls. There’d be all that. The other thing I—well there are a lot of memories from this stage ‘cause I was grown up now, relatively, besides going to school. Every, just before New Years, the people just in that community, the people that lived in the houses there including the Tabata’s, they would have, they would make mochi, Mochi-Tsuki Day. And they would take over the, well part of the boathouse, they would—I think the women must have steamed the rice somewhere, cooked the rice somewhere, and brought them. They would have the—you know something those about that tall, a log that tall that was hauled out—and they put the rice in there. And one man would pound and one man would turn the rice around. You know they have these new newfangled mochi makers. And they would sing, everybody would sing, you know. And they would—we would, those kids, we would all watch them all, he’s gonna get hit, but he never did. My uncle was very good. He was the one that was. . . And we would just marvel at him, there were some bad traits about him but he was really good doing that. And the ladies would, you know, get the hot dough, put it on the—and they had it all, tables laid out, and they had these wooden trays that they had made and they would pinch, one person would pinch it off, I don’t know the poor women who had to go through the hot rice thing and pinch it off. And all the other ladies would make the balls. And that was a big day and every now and then we get to chew on something. Do you think we could maybe go back a little bit and in terms of your family history? Before the war you had mentioned when we were speaking earlier that your father was a fisherman, so, and they were originally in Steveston. So can I ask where were your grandparents—I guess, because you are Sansei, your grandparents were first generation? Well, I am sort of Nisei. . . Do you kind of occupy a couple? Yeah. Okay. Because my mother was actually born in Canada, my father was born in Japan. Oh, okay. Yeah, it’s that old story where they sent their kids back to—my mother—when she was—she was born in Steveston but she was sent back. And she didn’t come back. And that’s why she had most of her schooling in Japan, has these friends. She didn’t come back until she got married, you know sort of the picture bride thing, except the families knew each other. Okay. Whereas my dad was born in Japan and came over with his mother. And my grandfather was already here. My grandfather came—he was born in 1866—and he came and immigrated to Canada in 1894-5. And dad and grandma came in 1913. My dad was born in 1901, so he was 12 years old when he came. My mom was born in 1915 and she went back to Japan when she was about 4 years old. And it’s funny, I think part of her family came back, like my grandmother came back with—because some of her sisters were born in Japan. I think she was the only one born here. And my grandmother was—my grandfather must have come back. I mean he probably stayed here, on the maternal side, with the kids because my aunt was born in Japan but she came back, much earlier than my mother. So her English was a lot better, whereas my mother, her English was very poor ‘cause she lived in the Japanese community all the time. She could go shopping and be polite to people, but try to get into a detailed conversation was, would be difficult for her. So my grandfather had, I think, he stayed here since he came back, since he immigrated. My dad came over and then they left one sister—my dad said they left one sister in Japan. She grew up in Japan, got married and came here. But the rest of dad’s family, the other three siblings were born in Canada. So my aunt who is the youngest one, the one that lived in Westbank was born here and never—she was, she never went to Japan. And so your father’s family, what part of Japan did they come from? From Mio, from Wakayama and my mother did, too. Oh both of them are from the same. Yeah they went to—my dad went to school until he was I think eight years old, he was 12 years old, I guess because they came when he was 12. Whereas my mother went to school all the way through and graduated in Japan. Do you— But they are quite bit younger. My mother is 14 years younger than my dad, so there’s a quite big age difference. Right. Do you know why your grandparents, like your father’s family, decide to come to Canada, and why your mother’s family came to Canada? Well, I think from that village there was one man—what was his name? It was part of this thing, Nikkei stories last year. Oh yeah. I think his name was Gihei Kuno? Was from Mio and he came, and saw that the fishing industry was very good. And a lot of people back in the village were poor and he recruited people to come, and I think that’s when my grandfather came. Ron offers them tea. So I think that’s the reason he came. My mother’s father, probably the same reason, they are from the same village. So a lot of people, I mean, this—that the village in Japan Mio is now called Amerika Mura because most of the people—and there’s always a shuttle going back and forth when there were people who owned houses in both places to go back and forth. So there’s still very many people back and forth, though? Oh I don’t know, there probably is. I’m not sure. They go back and forth to visit. Yeah. But whether they still have residences there. . . Houses. Only there are some who might have inherited houses, they don’t live there. Like Hiroko’s parents—father has one there, and they’re wondering what to do with the house. ‘Cause I went back with my parents in 1979, was it I think? Before I met Ron. And we stayed with a cousin of my mom’s, and they lived in Canada but they also had a house in Japan. And we stayed with them when we were in Japan. So there was quite a—I mean I think the other area, I think there are several pockets in Japan where, you know where people—there’s sort of a centre that people immigrated from, so. Anyway, that was the, one of the, I’d say the main reason he came from Japan. It was just that, better living and hope for a better life because I think my grandfather’s family had a farm. Because I remember going, when I visited Japan with my parents, we went by my mother’s, my dad said that that was our old farmhouse. But they must have sold it right away when they immigrated. But it’s interesting that my father registered our births in Mio, for some odd reason, It says so on your registry dear, so you can come back here. And then in terms of the marriage then, I mean, your mother and father came from the same area, so was the marriage between your parents decided upon before, or? It sounded like they travelled back and forth quite often. So how did that come together? I don’t think they travelled that often once they immigrated. I don’t think my father went back to Japan. My mother definitely didn’t go back to Japan once she married my dad. Because that trip I did with them in this late ‘70s, it was like forty years she would been away from Japan and it was so different for her. Before they were—it’s almost like—there weren’t trams even, you know. They travelled from the main city, I can’t remember what the name was—it will come to me—to get to Mio, which is a little village, there’s dotted villages along the coast, and it was a fishing village mainly that they had to take horse and buggy. But, what was the question? How did they get, how they got married because. . . Oh I think it was family knowing—cause definitely my mother was too young to know my dad. I mean she’s got, I mean, she used to get together with—besides these women that were in that picture—there would be men too, other people, who were interned elsewhere and they got together when they were back in, in the lower main land area. And there would be about 30 of them. And so she didn’t know my dad. She’d seen a picture of him. And before she could come, I guess she had to be married or something, there were some legal reason, she had to be married. So she said, she spent after she was married—that my father wasn’t there, he was here, right? She got married in Japan. She had to sleep, she couldn’t sleep alone, so she slept with one of her younger nephews. Laughs. And this is my uncle, who’s—or my cousin, who later lived with us. And you were saying, Oh yeah it was fun. He says that she fell asleep right away but my mother says and so—she finally came to, well after, you know, she got the papers and everything and came to Canada. Well I don’t know maybe she didn’t need papers, ‘cause she was born in Canada. But anyways she had to be a bride, this marriage had to take place for some odd reason. And she was, she wept she said for a couple of days because dad was much older than she was. He was losing hair by then. Anyway. So that’s, you know, she was —it was definitely, it wasn’t sort of a picture bride and that it was unknown. I think the families knew each other, so. I guess a lot of people just accepted it. I don’t think she had any problems with accepting it but. . .But then she was in this thing—I don’t know, do I have any other pictures? No, I don’t. But when she came they lived on—I got some—I don’t know if you are interested but—I didn’t look at these things before but just recently I got these papers from my brother. My brother had kept all the stuff from my parents that had legal documents and things besides these things. He finally moved from, he lived in the—my parents moved from Scotch Pond and went and lived, they built a house on, it’s not close to town but it was on the main street where there was residential areas that weren’t cannery. We lived there, as I say, I remember I went to work—I guess, I was about thirteen or so to pick fruit in the Okanagan, and the house was been built. I came back and they had moved into this new house. And I couldn’t believe it. My mother had changed completely. She looked like a modern woman, you know ‘cause just the fact that there was—she was in this new house with new appliances and fancy furniture and everything else. And then we moved to —when my father had a stroke in his, how old was he when he had a stroke? Early 80s? He lived to be 94, so I can’t remember exactly when. But it was after we did the Japan trip, had a stroke. And since all the kids were gone and everything and the younger of my brothers always lived with him and he didn’t get married. And so he bought the property next door which was bigger, and sold their property and built a big house that was on one level for my parents and then he had a sort of a suite upstairs. And from this big house for just three people and this huge garden that my mother was, had taken care of, he took, taken care of it because mother was getting ill and—then he lived there for, after they died, for a couple of years and then—or several years, five or six years—and he got sciatica and couldn’t manage the garden any more. So he moved into an apartment, you know, a condo, a small place. And so he gave these documents to my older brother who lived, you know, he had, he lived with his mother-in-law. It was funny because usually it is the oldest son who would takes care of the parents, right, where, in this case, my—the younger of the brothers took care of my parents and, because my brother, older brother was married already. After his father-in-law died, he moved in with the mother-in-law’s family, house, into mother-in-law’s house and fixed, renovated the house for her, so she was in the bottom level, single level. And after she died, many years after that, their two kids were gone, they decided they would downsize too. But they had this document, this attaché case full of these things, so my brother gave it to them, had given it to them and he said he doesn’t have room to keep this letter because he’s got everything else to keep, so I got it and I just left it there and didn’t look at it. Then last couple years ago, I think, it was two years ago, when they were asking us to, about the history that the Nikkei Centre did. I pulled it out to look at it: Woo there’s a lot of material in here, but I didn’t look at it in details. But then when you asked about this possession and that, there’s—I found these funny documents that, I shouldn’t say funny but you know, there’s a document here that describes what the property was and what they had, and the boat and that, and it says what it was worth. And see my father has signed this. At the bottom there. Oh wow. And it says, you know, they had two acres, it was farm land—I should show you the picture of the house. I don’t have the picture right now but... So it shows you what the actual legal description of the property was and how much it was worth when you bought it, how much the selling price was, and how much they could sell it for, the price sold by the Custodian. And it says loss, so I don’t know what that means. I guess they sold it for that much and then it was, oh I see, it was valued at that much plus some another, other assets including crops and equipment. So just to get this straight. This is the family property farm that your family was living on just before the war had started? Yeah. Okay so let’s just look at on No.1 Steveston Highway. It’s, yeah, I mean it’s all residential now but when we came back from internment to Steveston, that house still was there. And they had a neighbour called, Mr. and Mrs. Urquhart—I can’t remember their first name. Lucy was still alive. And they had held some of, some of the smaller things that they bought, wanted to have kept. I can’t remember even what it was like, I think it was photos and things. And she was still alive and she came to visit and she was a lovely lady. But the husband had died by then. They were the neighbours who—they were good friends of. . . So let’s see here, it was a small fruit farm, year of purchase 1996, estimated value of improvement, 1,200, assessed value at time of evacuation, is that 1,484? Yeah, 1,484. Estimate value of the farm at the time of the evacuation, I think, land and building, 2,050, equipment and supplies, is that 200? I think it’s 200. Well it’s hard to know, ‘cause it’s. . .doesn’t add up, does it? Oh, I see. This is the loss, that’s what it is. It’s hard to calculate that. Crops 800. So it would be 3,000 about. . . Oh, this is interesting. This sale has been protested. I don’t think dad got anything from that. Not that we know of. Do you, if it says it was protested, do you know if your dad maybe wrote a letter asking about the property? Do you know if he knew that the property was being sold off? I assume so. I don’t know. I know dad’s written lots of—dad’s English wasn’t very good, but he wrote a lot of letters to, see the Custodian office. Oh, really? But mostly it’s small issues, it wasn’t land or anything. Reads out the letter. Will you kindly send me my remaining goods to about address and at the same forward full statement from me in your early convenience? And your father’s name was. . .? Rintaro. Rintaro. There are some earlier ones too. Oh, wow. Shizu, these are amazing. I don’t know. I remember reading some of these. I think there are some other ones too that we gave to the Nikkei Centre for the displays but. . . Oh and it says here, oh fishing vessels, too. So type of boat, fishing. So your dad was a gillnetter. Yeah. Length 30 feet, beam 7 feet 6. . .engine. . .make. . . Horse power. . .estimated market value at time of evacuation 1,120, loss 405. I guess sold, oh for sale, 750, loss of 405. And then fishing gear, net 160, personal property household equipment, wow. . . Yeah I don’t know whether he got any compensation for any of them because, see I think he protested it but. . . Yeah, it seems so. I’m not sure, I’m not sure, it’s now sort of water under the bridge now but. . . Oh so this, so interesting, this was conducted much later when you guys were in Alberta. I guess it took a long time to process a lot of this. Wow, this is amazing. Yeah, never looked at it and I don’t know about legal implications of it at all but it’s something that suddenly struck me: Oh I got all this information that I didn’t know about. Yeah, okay so the farm you guys lived on, do you have, did you—I know you said you were quite young. I was just born. You were just born, so do you have family members who told you what the layout of the farm—did you guys live on a small house on the farm or? I have a picture of the house, put it in a . . . Shizu gets up to get the photos. I think all the siblings lived there. You must come here. Alright. We had a family reunion, it’s about ten years ago, is it? No? Ah, yes, probably. And each of the branches of the family except for the ones from Toronto who couldn’t come made a poster of their family so the other one can. . . Oh, this is so cool. So, where is the house? Oh my god, look at all these photos. Oh, neat how it breaks it down. Yeah, just internment, post-war and pre-war. . . Oh, there it is. So it was a reasonably big building and this is the front of it where the family members are who were—you can see my brother was probably over a year old or a year old. Wow, it is, it looks like quite a large house. Yeah. From the standards of those days, I think it was—but they built usually a big house. The neighbour’s house was the same house size. Oh really? Wow. I mean it’s like that Atagi Boatworks house, you know it was. I don’t know. It had big open spaces because there was an office space, but it had one, two, three—three small bedrooms upstairs and then there was one large area. I don’t know what they used it for but I know my, because of dad’s fishing and they got into the net business, importing nylon nets from Japan. They used to do the corking and that up there. We’d have, as kids, we’d have to do the needles that they did the, you know, putting the corks on. So it was quite a large house. As I say you know that many people who were living there so. So your father at the time, was he a gillnetter the whole time before the war? Yeah. I think well for, when he first came, I think he went to school for a while then he fished with his dad. And then his dad was quite a bit older so he didn’t fish for him anymore. I think he—grandpa—retired. And he fished for maternal uncle. He’s a Hanazawa. And then I think later, about in the 20s, he fished on his own. So it was always as a gillnetter because, you know, in those days I guess, I think even on the Fraser River they couldn’t have, they didn’t have mechanized netting, you know the drums that pull the net. So he was the puller and my grandfather, or his uncle, would be the person who was you know keeping track of the boat. Whether they had engines for that or not—well they probably. I think on the Fraser they could have motorized boats but then not the drums, or they didn’t have a boat, or they must have had some kind of mechanism, you know, but they had to roll them up on the drums but somebody had to pull them. So I don’t know, by the time when my dad was fishing on his own I guess you know the mechanized drums came up, came in. And then what was your mother doing at that time? I guess helping on the farm. My mother—well she had two kids before I was born and she helped on the farm, I guess. My grandmother was the main farm keeper. She had chickens and vegetables and things. I guess they must have sold some of that. But a lot of it went to feeding the family. Because my mother was saying that with her second child, she had troubles and she lost all her teeth. But before that happened with the second child, they would keep all the chickens for her Laughs. because she needed it. With the first born, it was bad, then so it was the same with the second one. I didn’t realize that until I was in my teens. My mother had false teeth ever since. . . Yeah. To lose all your teeth during the second pregnancy—god. Anyway, so she never complained about it. I wouldn’t have known. I mean I must have seen false teeth on. Never dawned on me, Oh you didn’t have teeth all that time, I thought it was just a new thing. So did your parents ever share any memories or your older siblings who were alive at the time about Pearl Harbor and when the uprooting actually started to happen in Steveston? Did they ever tell you anything about that? No. No? Not a word. Well I was too young and even if they were talking about it, you know, I don’t think. And even when I was older they didn’t talk too much about the internment except for, you know, things that happened with family and friends and that sort of talk. And they were more concerned about who they left back in Japan, you know. Sending them foods and clothing, things like that. And I didn’t know that my father was writing letters, of trying to get his gramophone back. Okay, so if, the first place that your family was moved to was in Kaslo, correct? Do you know what kind of items they brought with them, like because, you know, usually they were only allowed a certain amount of items, so? No, I only know certain items that we didn’t bring with us. Like every Japanese family apparently has those display of dolls for Girl’s Day and they had certain things for Boy’s Day. But she says—I was wondering, you know, we got this one doll, it was going, it was for Girl’s Day and I remember it was sort of first Girl’s Day, I remember even having—get the feeling that there was, she was trying to make up for it, the loss of other days. You know how they have the little terrace with all the different flowers? And they would make mochi and they would have goodies and things like that. And for the Boy’s Day, we would have the Koi. But that’s from my perspective, that’s the only thing we didn’t have. They didn’t bring with them. They didn’t say anything else. I know that they couldn’t have radios. And I know first time we got a radio was in, when we were back in Westbank, came back from Alberta. That was the first time? Yeah. Okay. Because I remember we, starting to listen to Hockey Night in Canada. Things like that, the Lone Ranger. Nice. I don’t think—and my dad, before they came back to, they were in Westbank, I don’t know whether the compensation money came through or not, but they bought land in Surrey with my uncle. And they bought—I don’t know how many acres, but enough for having sort of chickens. And they—and in the end they didn’t develop or do anything about it. My father fished and finally moved—they, they were looking for a house and they decided to build another house besides, you know, to get out of the house on the Scotch Pond. I think they put the money they have got, well, they sold the property in Surrey and then they probably built the house in Richmond. I can’t imagine how they did it otherwise. But that was quite a few years after they had bought the actual property in Surrey. And it’s, you know, like the one in Richmond, it’s worth a lot of money now. So the house is still there, the one in Surrey? No, they didn’t build on it at all. Oh, they didn’t build on—oh it’s just a land. Oh, okay. And it was quite close to where my dad’s uncle, who my dad fished with actually, finally settled when he came back. He wanted to be away from the river, he said. So what are some of not just your own memories because you said were quite young in the beginning, what are some things that your family told you about when your family was in Kaslo and Lemon Creek? I don’t remember any. . . Not much. No, I just remember, you know, what kids like to do. Oh, I do—no, I shouldn’t say that, it’s not that they didn’t, but they told us. But I remember lining up. They used to have rations for ice cream for kids. Oh, okay. And I remember lining up and my brother’s being a bit sort of aggressive. And my mother would say, That’s not Japanese, get back. That sort of thing. But nothing to do with the internment. I don’t remember anything. My mind might have erased it, I guess, but I don’t think so. But it was quite nice, as a kid, you are in the community and there’s somebody look after you and keep you happy—happy and fed—and no discomfort or anything. And there were, you know, other people who helped out. I remember in Westbank, we lived—you know where Quails’ Gate Winery is? Yeah. We lived—the ranch was this whole area that was, all residential now when included the Quails’ Gate Winery site. And we lived on the other side of the road, and the mountainside where the houses were, and there were some bunk houses below the road and there was. . .oh, barn there, the old, I think it’s a Stewart home. In the house you were in, it’s over there on the wall. Oh yeah, that’s my sister in law. And the corner on your left. She does water colour, so she made a water colour of the cabin in Westbank. Unfortunately the picture she took it from has another house in front of it. Oh, that’s pretty. There’s small one here and then there is—this was our, our place. It was a main room was here then there were bedrooms or two rooms on this side. My grandparents had the small one and the rest of us, the rest of the family lived here. And there was—this was the outhouse. And I always wondered about it ‘cause they used to store dynamite in the outhouse. They did! They needed to dynamite to trigger the avalanche. Comical part was, this was at three holer, it wasn’t just an outhouse. Oh really? Wow. They had two adult ones and one, one for children. Oh wow. And my brother used to be really mean. As you were sitting there with it, he would—he says, Oh you’re gonna be long, so he’d come in and he’d come in and sit in the adult one. And then he would actually go down the hole in it. And I would be screaming, Don’t go any further! Oh my god. So these are the cabins in Westbank, just to be. . .? Yeah. So there weren’t—I mean, the other cabins with same tar paper walls, you know. And just holes through the cracks of the lumber. Whole winters, wake up to the water frozen. Oh yeah we had a fish bowl out. We had lots of pets but my mother wouldn’t allow any of them in the house. And so we got a fish, gold fish. And I remember one severe winter, the fish bowl had thick ice on it and my mother said It’ll survive. And we didn’t believe her, she said, It would melt on its own. When it melted the fish was still alive. Actually it’s so funny that you say that. So we, you know, in Japan you have omatsuri and things like that. And there is always these games, so you know they do like really bad kingyo, or gold fish, you know, where you try to pick out one with a little paper spatula thing. So I did that every year and most of my gold fish died. But one year, my grandmother decided to put the gold fish in the garden—we had these big ceramic pots, but they were in the ground and so she just threw them in there with just regular water. And they lasted, I think, about three and half years. And they went through a Japanese winter. And then in Tokyo, like you still get snow and it gets cold. And the same thing happened. There was a whole, a thing of ice one time we were there for New Years and I said to my grandmother, They’re dead. They are not going to survive, and then it slowly melted and we peeked in and they were still swimming no problem. It’s funny. So what other animals did you have? You had fish. Oh we had—there were cats all the time. We didn’t have a cat—so my mother didn’t like cats. In fact they definitely couldn’t come in the house. But we had our pet cats outside and they would roam from place to place. But we had a dog. And on the ranch we lived, my uncle sort of managed the workings of the farm, but the head manager who kept, he was also the guy who ran the pump house for the irrigation. And they had a collie, really nice female collie. And she had a poodle—what do you call the dogs anyway?—and my brother wanted one and my mom said that, you know, you have to look after if you get it, so. Anyway, we got it and it was our pet but he had to live outside. But he was a mutt. He was sort of looks slightly pop collie-ish but he was a mutt. But the day we were gonna move from Westbank to Steveston, my brother sat on the steps and says he is not going without Laddie. That was the first time—oh, he really likes this dog. Anyway, in the end my parents acquiesced and got a license and he came with us. And then at Scotch Pond, he became sort of a mascot of the families because nobody else had a dog. And he didn’t have to be fed. He went around from place to place and got fed. And he lived to be quite old. He must’ve—when I was going to university, that he died. So he was getting close to twenty. Anyway I came home and it was before JFK anyway. Came home one day, calling—he always greet you, Where’s Laddie? Oh, he got struck by a car today. Anyway apparently I wasn’t there because it was during the day, day. There was this funeral possession that went out to the point in Scotch and they buried him. That’s still a really long life though, around twenty years. Yeah and he came to us when we were still in Westbank, so I don’t know if we had him about a year or so he’s not. . . I was probably 18 when I went to university. So can I ask you to elaborate on the Kendo club in Lemon Creek? You had shown the picture of, I think, Mr. Akune? And your father and him started a Kendo club? Well they—I don’t know if Mr. Akune was—I think he was involved in Steveston, too. They were doing it in Steveston. They had a Kendo Club. And when they got together in Kaslo, they continued it. I’ve got lots of the pictures of that, too; I’ve got volumes of pictures of that. And when they came back here, they had a Kendo club and it met at the old gym in the community centre. And I guess after several years they decided with—well the community centre got upgraded anyway, and they made the Martial Art Centre. But my father was—when we went to Japan, in the late 70s when I went with my parents, we went to visit one of the masters in Japan. He was top grade and he had visited—he had visited Stevston before the war, came to Stevston even after the war ‘cause he knew Dad well. And he lived in Kamakura. I think it was Kamakura. That’s what why we got to see the Buddha there. And he took us out to dinner, and I think he—my dad was eighth dan and ninth is the top. Wow so this was quite serious— Well my dad was never a competitor. I think he did compete when he was younger. But he taught after that. You get promotion from teaching, too. And he had offered Dad the ninth dan and Dad said, No I don’t— he doesn’t want it because, you know, he doesn’t think he’s worthy of it. So he refused it and the man was very gracious and he says, Yeah, okay, that’s fine, you know, he won’t contest that. But just two years ago was it? When I lost my tooth at the banquet? It was three or four years ago. They had a big tournament here in Vancouver and—what was his name? I can’t remember. I should know these thing, it’s written down. But the president of the Vancouver Kendo Association came and said they are having this banquet and they are giving, they’re honouring old members, past and present, and Mr. Akune was one, then my uncle Mas, and my dad and they won some family representation there. And so I said we’ll go and so we went, but then we had to say a speech. I’m not, you know, impromptu speech type, I had to later written it down. I gave a little blurb and—it wasn’t because of that I lost my tooth but when I was eating a meal, all of a sudden the tooth fell out before I had to get up. And it was a major concern because this tooth, it had a crown and came off, and at first I thought it was the bone from the chicken and I was mumbling around, I will take it out, I will take it out politely. Then it was a tooth. And this was during the banquet? Oh god. So on top of having to think of what to say, I had to say, Mmmm, better keep this mouth, lip closed. Yeah, no kidding. Oh so. . . But yeah, they—I don’t know if it’s worth it but Shizu gets up to grab something. all these documents that someone. . . Yeah, no, it’s great. You know the emperor gives out these condemnations, or what do we call them to—Japanese of, who contributed, there were about 2,000 of them. Yeah, Rising Sun. Yeah. My dad got a silver one. Oh, that’s exciting. My grandfather actually got one, too, when I was around ten years old. They did the whole portrait and it’s still hanging in our family’s office and den. Well, my dad didn’t live in Japan because he had stroke by then, but. But he received one? That’s exciting. He received one and there’s a pictures of the Consulate General. Shizu gets up to grab something else. It might be even framed and my brother might have it. But there’s a picture of him there. Do you read Japanese? No, oh yeah. Look at that. That’s so neat. And why was he given this award? You said. I think community service. You know—it’s—I don’t think it was Kendo or anything. But the Kendo one . . . Oh no, this is a Kendo Federation Award, and distinction in there. It got on there. So he was quite involved. He judged tournaments and taught quite a bit. When did he start doing Kendo? When he was a young child in Japan? He did mention it, it was mentioned somewhere. I don’t think he did Kendo in Japan. I think he was once he got here. Once he got in Canada. So the Kendo Club that they set up in Kaslo, were they quite popular or was it? Oh yeah. This is, here is the Kendo Clubs, they had a male one and a female one. I think we were enrolled in Lemon Creek that long, but I don’t think we had infrastructure to do that. Seems like there is a lot of people who participated though, just looking from the photo. And my aunt actually took Kendo, that’s the youngest of my mother’s sisters. So Masao is your uncle, yes? And then Chieko Kondo. . . She is my aunt. She actually married my cousin, the one that lived with us in, on Scotch Pond? They are the same age. They went to school together, although I think she stayed there longer for education and Tom came back here so they didn’t know each other as adults. So in terms of what your family did when they were in Kaslo and in Lemon Creek and then Raymond, what did your parents do, did they work on the farm or did they. . .? Well in Raymond, definitely. They were crop sharers so they worked on the farm, on the sugar beet farm, so it’s planting and then harvesting. But I think, you know, like harvesting which would be pulling out and putting on a wagon because then they would take it off to the, probably motorized vehicles, so that would take it to the distribution point, so the gathering points. And I remember every now and then they would let us go out there. And the irrigation ditches used to be, when they were filled with water, as kids they weren’t that deep. So we used to play in them. Oh cool. They weren’t clean, it was just dirty water, but it was something to play. So it—floats boat down and things like that. And in Kaslo, what did your family do? Ah, I don’t know. I think somebody worked at something because there was some sort of pay things, stubs. Oh really? What about that. Didn’t your dad work in some logging or milling or something? Might have helped there, yeah. I don’t know how much there was in Kaslo, maybe in Lemon Creek. Yeah. Yeah, Dad for some odd reason, being in a community person, was exempt from that. It sounded like he was exempt from working in that, you know, just being in up-right working in a mill and taken away from his family. I don’t know if this thing works. That’s where I need Ron’s help. There’s this little box. How do you take this thing off? It’s probably just a little tight? Oh this one is a snap. It always ends up being that way. It didn’t go into much details, but I’m trying to find out what it was. It’s funny. And you got this from your brother as well? Yeah, this was all in, in this little poke-hole keys. See it says pay book. There is one for my grandfather. Oh, isn’t that neat. And there isn’t much in it, because, I guess they weren’t there that long. Now I need—no it doesn’t say what the date—but it was ‘42, but, yeah, I guess it would be ’42 there. Have you seen one of these before? No. I haven’t. Reads the book. September 4th, ’42, date received. . . It’s not wages. ‘APNDAs’, I wonder if there is a . . . So looks like every week your—this one is your grandfather? So looks like your grandfather was getting paid 506 every week. Can I see? For being old. . . Yeah but it’s not for very long, is it? No. There is something for my mom. . . But my mother has, kept track of somethings in Japanese, you see. Oh interesting. Doesn’t say dates but I think they are actual. . .what is that? See I couldn’t read hiragana. She’s keeping track of something. It’s going somewhere. Yeah I should probably go through a lot of these things and talk about it. Japanese. . . Sorry, so what were these cards here? The registration cards. I think they had to keep with them. Now there’s some things that look like cheque books, you know. I could never match up the amount. There’s a pay. . .661. Yeah, I’ve never seen the pay books before, these little cheques. 2620, it must. . . it just. . .someone signed it. . . see who it is. 1918, 19. . . He must have gotten something for something. You know you were saying how your friends, they all, you know, all kind of stayed together, right? When your family moved, were they separated a lot from other families in Steveston or did you guys all move together? I don’t know ‘cause definitely there’s some—it’s hard to say. The Domais definitely lived in Lemon Creek, but her father wasn’t a fisherman, he was a gardener, but they were from the same original community in Mio. Annie Tanaka—was her maiden name—her family, I don’t think they were in Kaslo or Lemon Creek. I know a lot of relatives were there, like my grandmother, my aunt, they were always in the vicinity. I guess especially my grandmother because she had my uncle who had polio, and he was disabled although he couldn’t walk and he was okay with talking, but he couldn’t work. So he was dependent on the family. And then my aunt was younger, the youngest one. And they all stuck together and every now and then there was the other aunts. . .with them. And they were always, they were in Kaslo—I think they were in Lemon Creek for a while. But they went to Grand Forks after that because that’s where one of my aunts went. And then went to—so I don’t think they went to Alberta at all. I don’t know. Wasn’t it the Akune’s that went to Alberta and suggested to your dad? Yeah, we went over that already. Sorry. But when I think about the Kagoshima people that are my friends, now there are about three different ones of them, they were all in Alberta about the same time. Oh okay. And they were fisher people, too. But, see, I wouldn’t know who were friends. I mean they were all, you know, if you are from Mio you’re a friend, or relative. Well okay so in terms of coming back to Steveston, just to clarify, it was because your father was a fisherman and. . . Had somebody reached out to your father to come back to Steveston or had he made the decision with your mother to go back to Steveston on their own and then trying to pick up fishing again? I don’t know. I think they must have communicated with the cannery at some point because when we got here—well, it wasn’t quite ready. We didn’t move into the house right away but then, you know, there is always logistics. It was only a couple of days that we lived in the old Murakami House that was on, near Phoenix Cannery, there was a huge house and there was about four families all gathered there. And then we got distributed to the cannery houses. But I think that’s sort, probably was in place. Don’t remember Dad saying, but my brother wasn’t home because my brother in the end worked for Gulf of Georgia for a long time and got to know the people. Okay, so you were early. So you guys came back in 1951? ‘51 So you were around 9 years old, 9-10 years old? Ah, would be 9. ‘Cause you were born in ’42, right? Yeah. Because I would be—I was going to Grade 3. Okay. ‘Cause I would be six, seven, eight but definitely I went into Grade 3 so maybe it was ’50, ‘cause I would be eight years old. But my mother says ’51, I think. My mother has these things written down somewhere, but. So I’ve talked to a couple of other people about, like, going and coming back to Steveston and their memories of what it was like to come to Steveston and start school, so. What were your memories of kind of starting school again? ‘Cause you were, I mean, like you said, you were so young when your family started moving, so? Well, well I remember the move, with my fiasco, with my brother. Well with the dog, you lnow? Oh, yeah. And then we couldn’t keep the dog, it had to be in a different compartment in that. Remember coming on the train, I liked the train trip. ‘Cause there was always things to see, you know, going through the Rockies and that, well not the Rockies, that was from—it was Kettle Valley, I think. So through the . . . Through the Coquihalla? Yeah, and coming to Vancouver, and realized that it was a big place because there were so many people and then the railways went everywhere and there were, there were actually escalators and first time I had to get on an escalator. I guess those days. . . Even then, in ’51? Yeah. But that’s, I don’t think it was. . . Well you think, I mean, I didn’t, we didn’t go to big places to shop. Closest we went to was Kelowna. We didn’t go into other fancy places. No, I just wondered whether escalators were a common thing in the 50s. There was an escalator. I had to learn how to get on one. I’ve never been scared. You know you get on one, okay. That was an eye-opener. Starting school, I don’t think there was any problem. Everybody was new, sort of. There were probably people who were there, but we outnumbered them. I’ve got some class pictures and that there, you know. I would say fifty per cent or more were Japanese. You, but the students themselves overall, everybody was mixed together? Mhmm. Although they had two—two classes of, at least the grades that I went through school and, from Grade 3 on to Grade 6, there were three—two classes. ‘Cause we would talk about the classes, you know, when I talk to my friends, I had so and so, I had so and so, that, compare notes, things like that. So there were two classes, so yeah, I was —I don’t know, ours was probably— shouldn’t say that. I can’t remember. The other problem was some of them were segregated, even then. ‘Cause I remember seeing, I don’t know, later on in Junior High it wasn’t. You mean boy and girl? Yeah. You see. So it was separated by gender then? Yeah, I think in Grade 3, we were still separated. I can’t remember any boys in Grade 3. And what was—Do you remember the name of the school that you attended? It’s called Lord Byng. Oh, so you went to Lord Byng. In Steveston, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. And the original old school wasn’t there any more but my sister went to the other, sort of, Grade 1, 2 which was in a different building, an older building, and they had this newer concrete building and Grade 3 started there. And because they were building new schools and that after Grade 6, there were shifts, I went to Cambie for two years and then they built this new school called Steveston High School on No. 2 Road, went to Grade, I think 9 and 10? And then to Richmond High which was the high school for 11 and 12. I can’t remember exactly the dates but anyway it was sort of breakdown; we didn’t stay in one school once we were in junior high, got moved around. But the teachers seem to move around with us so it wasn’t so bad. I didn’t mind. It wasn’t very good because they would always tell me that your cousin who was older than you. And in terms of home life, you mentioned earlier that you spoke predominantly Japanese at home? I would think so because when I was going to, in Westbank, I didn’t speak much English. They say my cousin laughed at me. Right. So I don’t think—but I would think my brothers were exposed to English because definitely my younger brother went to kindergarten, there was a Caucasian teacher, so. Your mom didn’t really speak much English. No. Very, very little actually. Even as you got older? Did she mostly speak in Japanese? Oh she wouldn’t speak in English to us. No. Oh so it was always Japanese even as you got older. And we would speak English and she would understand it. Oh okay, so it was dual languages. Yeah. Or at least she would try to understand it. Yeah. And we would mix in with whatever Japanese we knew, but—and my grandparents, we were brought up essentially by my grandmother because mom was always working even through, you know, even through grade school when we were still small. We’d come home and it would be grandma at home. So you went all the way through high school and then when you graduated and went to university, what university did you go to? To UBC. You went to UBC. Yeah. It was, well, mainly because you are living at home. But the other thing is I got scholarships and, I remember one scholarship—I never told my parents about it, I don’t think I told my parents about it. Well when we were graduated, they said that if you became a teacher, you can get this scholarship Shizu has specified that the scholarship was awarded by the Crown Zellerback Corporation and it would provide you with tuition and school books and things for your four year teacher training. But I wasn’t ready for, to be a teacher, because I had written up in my career type planning thing, lab technician. And I didn’t—wouldn’t want to commit myself to be a teacher, say okay then have to refuse it after I discovered that I wasn’t a teacher. Maybe teaching would have been good for me, but they gave me a scholarship. Now I didn’t know whether I was supposed to go to UBC or not ‘cause I got good grades and one of the higher ups in the grades and things. And it was stipulated for UBC. And then also there was an entrance exam when you graduated, you had to write in three fields. And I wrote English, I think English, Biology, and Math. And if you got over 80% then you got your tuition, half your tuition paid at UBC. So it wasn’t much in those days but it was half your tuition for a family with nobody else going to school. Oh my, my brother went to Grade 13, it was called. There was a normal type of school. And he went one year and he didn’t like it. And my sister went to one year university and she didn’t like it. So I was the only one that persevered. But so I got these scholarships and most of it was paid for because of the dual, especially the tuition and books and that. So I went to UBC then stayed and did a Masters, that’s when I went, after that, I went to Germany. And it’s because you know I talk about David Suzuki but it’s because I had a friend called Kazy Tabata. Actually her brother, he was one of the Kendo ones in Kaslo, who was quite a bit older than her. They come from the family of nine kids and she was seventh from the bottom, and he was at the top, oldest one, so he was a good friend of my dad. And so I met Cassie and I said, you know, I was telling dad that her name was Kazy Tabata, Oh she must be from Tsutomu’s family. So I asked Kazy and Oh, yeah he is my older brother, oldest brother. So there was a connection there. And she was taking Zoology and I was taking Zoology and she was working as a—no her sister was working in Zoology as a technician. And she got a job with a fruit fly geneticist who was there before David Suzuki, doing, you know, clean ups and making the whatever, helping. And she says, This is Band, who is father or Doctor Band, her boss, needs his, her husband needs a technician to do dish washing and if you want a, you know, job then you go talk to him. So I got a job working for him. This is the cutest story, I’m making it probably too long, but anyway. No, that’s okay. I worked for him second year to almost fourth year. I guess the middle of fourth year and the Bands decided that they were Americans, so decided that they were going to move back. And Mrs. Band’s position, or Dr. Band, female, was going to be replaced with David Suzuki. So Kazy was going, because she knew the techniques of doing the sort of food and cleaning and taking care of them, sort of bit. And she was going to get the job there. I didn’t have a job because Dr. Band was moving, so I got a job, somebody else in the Zoology Department took me because they knew Band and I used to do odd things when I wasn’t busy. And so I worked with them, Finnigan and Ford. And then David Suzuki came. And then Kazy decided she was going into education. So Cassie says, Why don’t you—you know because I was helping with the food and that. And that’s how I got into work with David Suzuki and after a couple of years, I’d said. . . And I had a specific project to do when I was working for him, too. It was one of these ones that were parts of another bigger project. So I asked him, and I said, Could I get a job, do a Masters? No, I think he was saying, he said, You should do a Masters or something. So it was either we both were agreeable so I did a Masters with him. And it was after that that I got this job to go to Germany through him. So yeah it was sort of his hippie heydays that I was working in his lab. I don’t know if it was the best time, but anyway. Yeah what was it like to work with him at that time? Because naturally—so he was your supervisor then? Yeah he was my supervisor. He was a good teacher, I mean everybody loved him as a teacher. I mean, I don’t know about his social life, but that’s something. . . You know they were hippies and that’s how he lived. So I met his wife, not then very much, she wasn’t in the scene very much. And he would bring his kids to the lab to babysit them I guess when she was busy. She was working at the university too. She was working for neuro-sciences. Wow. Oh for, what was his name? McGeer. McGeer. But that might’ve been a little bit later. Pat McGeer. But I got to know the kids and they were still sort of early age preschool even. Tomiko and Troy and then there was Laura who was just born. Didn’t know her. And David would take us onto these camping trips, I remember. And he would take the kids with us. And he had a lot of babysitters because they were good kids and we loved to babysit them. Laughs. We went to Tofino one year. Camped out on the flats and those days you can pitch a tent on the sands of Long Beach. Yeah I was going to say you can’t do that anymore. You made sure you were far away from the high tide line. Things like that. Took us, the whole lab. They would rent two cars, big ones and we would fill them. And once we went to a meeting in Banff. Another time we went to a meeting down in Monterey. And it was always a trouble when you—I think twice we went across the border. And you know how hippies were looked upon in those days. Laughs. Had to wait around because all these guys got shacked down. So it was an entertaining time. Laughs. But he definitely was a good teacher. So what time frame are we looking at now that you’re doing your Masters? So this was in? Uh 60s. . . I guess ‘65-’66 to ‘69. Okay. Yeah I think sixty. . . Yeah I did it in three years. I think ‘65 was probably when I started working for him. My masters. And after I came back from Germany I went to see him first for a post doctoral position. He was still there and he says, Oh you should have come yesterday, I just gave the job to what’s his name? No! What was his name? He was a grad student about the same time as I was doing my grad studies there. And he says, But I know a guy in biochemistry who could use somebody like that. And that’s how I got a job in bio-chemistry. And I did a post-doc there and after that it turned to a research associate position. But I stayed there for about thirteen years. Wow. And he was getting close to retirement so he said, You should start looking for something else. Because I had applied for faculty positions at UBC, which probably was something I shouldn’t have done because there was so much competition that I didn’t get it. I think I did it twice and then. . . and I actually, before I got a research position with Gordon Tever at the end of my post doc years, because Mike Smith was a neighbouring lab and I knew the people at Mike Smith’s lab and Carolyn and Astell who was working with Mike then had done a Masters with, combined with Mike Smith and Suzuki. And so we used to see Mike around when I was in Suzuki’s lab. They’d go out and get crab, beach seining for crab because they were looking at crab genetics—not genetics—crab DNA. Well they usually got them the right size, usually. And then we pull up this wad of crab that they got the DNA out of, but the testes and the ovaries out of them. So we’d have these crab fests. Anyway that was beside the point, that’s how I knew Mike. And so I went to Mike and asked him for—because I knew Shirley who was the wife of geranium friend. And she said, Oh go talk to Mike. And so I ask Mike and he says, Oh yeah, oh yeah, come in. Because I think Carole was looking for a permanent position, she was going to be leaving. But he says, You better ask Gordon first. So I went back to Gordon Tanner and I think, oh I’d be okay with him. But Gordon says, Oh I need one too, research associate. I said, You got Ian Gillem already. Anyway I stayed with Gordon Tener but when Gordon was going to retire let’s say way back when, I digress, he said that I should start looking for another job. So again Shirley Gillam, who I just—because she was leaving Mike’s lab and finding something for herself—she had been interviewing with people and she said that she was going to take this one position at the Research Centre at Children’s, but that there’s this guy Jim Hogg at St. Paul’s who might be interested in you because, well I was in Gordon Tanner’s lab, I picked up on this technique in situ hybridization. I won’t go into the details of it, but this guy and the fellow Jim Hog at St. Paul’s had just come back from his sabbatical. He was a pathologist and more senior member of the scientific member of the community. Especially in pathology of the lung. But he had just come back from Oxford where he had taken a sabbatical for two years to in situ hybridization and he needed somebody to help him. So that’s how I got the job at St. Paul’s and then after that I sort of, you know, applying. He was very good, he supported me as a research associate for a couple of years. And I got into writing papers, grants and all this for him, with him, and writing papers. And I said, Well wouldn’t it be better if I got an independent appointment and could apply for other research grants? And he says, Well we could try that. And I think I was—I had a fellowship with the BC Lung Association and they supported that. And said that because my position—to get a position as an assistant professor, you either had to have position that the university and they would pay your salary or you could be grant funded. And all through my life I had been grant funded. Wow. I think even the last years I was grant funded through all my various incarnations. And the BC Lung Association said that they would support me and so that’s how I got my first job after that. There were other grant applications that you can apply for salary. For the—it was called, what was it called? It was called Natural Research Foundation, you couldn’t get salary support for them in your research, you could apply for operating grants and research grants, but not salary for yourself, you could get salary for people working, you know technicians, post docs and things like. And even when the CIHR came out the Canadian Health Sciences Research. They kept the same stipulation. So you had to get salary funding from somebody else if the university wouldn’t take you. And I never even thought about applying for the university for—because that means you had to do a lot more teaching, a lot more administration, besides having a research lab whereas this way I had little— You taught for quite a while. I taught, but I had no administrative functions as such. Okay I see. And I did peer research and a little bit of . . . You had to do two things, you had to predominate in two areas of those three. Administration, research and teaching. So I was predominantly research in the beginning when CIHR came out you had to put in teaching. So I used to teach graduate student courses and some of the lab courses for strictly lab people who were training to be lab technicians or there was a branch called laboratory medicine. And then when they started to do this—what’s the new. . . Problem based learning? Set up for the med schools? They wanted more tutors, and then you had to—more obliged to tutor. So that was more work for—as a teacher besides the—I was doing the, other things too. So I got away with it but all the people in the lab, the people who were the members of the lab, were collaborating with me, or. . . And Jim Hogg used to have an NIH grant and NIH grants you could pay salary. So the last couple of years I was on a NIH grant and that’s where my salary came from. And I got—I think I had a cystic fibrosis scholarship one year for my salary. You know I was trying to get money for salary, that was the problem. Jim was very good and he had this, not only NIH, but he had pharmaceutical funding and some of that you can distribute your funds from different places for my salary. So I sort of relied on him to negotiate these things. Wow sounds like you’ve done a lot in terms of the research work and lab work. Yeah well I think for me research is like a hobby. I never took it seriously, you know? Kyla laughs. Gee that’s why I was such a—I wasn’t one of these people who was really gung-ho on research and afterwards when I think about graduate students now with PhDs, I was thinking, Oh I couldn’t compete with that. Laughs. They knew what they wanted and they knew what to say. She says that but when I first met her and she was working in Gordon’s lab at UBC, and it was not uncommon for her to work eighteen, twenty-four hours straight. She would come looking kind of dopey. He’d bring me, my dinner to me in the lab. Laughs. Oh that’s nice. But see I wasn’t—I was doing research, I was having fun. So for you it didn’t really feel like work-work then? Yeah, yeah. No, when I had to start writing papers, it got to be a little bit, but I got good at writing papers and that got to be fun. And then I got to edit student papers, I thought, Oh this isn’t that much fun, but it really helped them and that was good. That’s amazing. So for those who are listening you’re specialty, I mean we talked about it a little bit before but for those who are listening, what was your specialty in terms of research in general? You were a professor of pathology. I was never a pathologist. Well see, I was hired there and becoming an assistant professor in the end because I knew in situ hybridization. Well I— to explain things, I was very good at in situ hybridization because the animal I was working most, the drosophila and it had the salivary glands. And the salivary gland chromosomes, unlike other chromosomes in the rest of the body, maybe a few other ones, in drosophila and one of the chironomids and maybe a few other insects, dipteras. They have what's called polytene chromosomes and the chromosomes normally separate after they duplicate and they go off on their own things. . . Okay. Well these polytene chromosomes and salivary glands didn't separate when the cells separated. In fact, the cells just got bigger and the chromosomes stayed together. So the chromosomes, when you think of DNA, is what makes up the chromosome and in one chromosome there'd be two strands of DNA. And you'd have two chromosomes, one from each of your parents, if everything works well. In the salivary glands, they didn't separate, they stayed together. And so the DNA essentially, were duplicates, neighbor duplicates, tandem duplicates across this way. And so you can look at it in a microscope, and you could see the actual—you know, human chromosomes you have to have reasonably good microscopes to look at them, and then you'd have to use special staining techniques to actually be able tell who's who, if you're a good cytologist you could probably tell. But these drosophila chromosomes from I think when they were, stuck together in the middle and you could tell that, just under a light microscope that these were the arms of these chromosomes because they were so big. Wow. And the nice thing was in situ hybridization was using—localizing, where the genes were. This piece of DNA that you have on the chromosome. And you think of drosophila as about. . . A million base pairs. . . Anyway, to make it short. . . Laughs. Getting technical. Everyone laughs. I'm gonna follow up with an email for you to spell everything out for me while I'm transcribing. Everyone laughs. I've got most of them. There's a couple. . . You probably don't need this for anything, but anyway just out of interest. . . Yeah. And to keep my mind sharp. . .Everyone laughs. That's good, good. You take this piece of DNA that you have. . . Yeah. And you, you label it in such a way that you could see the label afterwards. There's different ways of doing it. Oh okay. And other days it was radioactivity. So you would radioactively label it with a specific constituent on the DNA. And there's different ways of doing it, but it would get labelled. And then you would—because DNA is complementary, there's two strands complementary to each other. So this single strand of DNA would bind to it's complement under appropriate conditions. You could then go back and look and see, where that labelled DNA went— Oh interesting. And say it's on this chromosome, this site. And the drosophila was well mapped because it's genetics was known and they knew where certain genes were already. They didn't know what the actual protein it produced was in those days but they knew where the—and so you can map where your piece of DNA was. And we, Gordon Tanner's lab was interested in what's called a transfer RNA. It's a type of RNA that's used in protein synthesis, and wanted to know where the genes were and how they were distributed so you could—I mapped about, I don't know how many of these. . . Other graduate students were actually sequencing the DNA of these genes once we localized them, and take them out. And looking at the actual structure of the RNA itself. So it was sort of a group thing that went on, but I did mostly the in situ hybridization, found where it was, and then they would get the corresponding gene and then. . . because what we're doing, we're hybridizing the tRNAs, which was an RNA, which is equivalent to a DNA except slightly different. Right. But had the same hybridizing—or complementary base capacity that hybridizing didn't. The problem was when I went to Jim’s lab, it was a step further because human chromosomes are so small, that they were. . . They had really sensitive techniques and had other ways of amplifying the signal. And later on there were other ways of doing it by what's called polymerase chain reaction too. But in those days it was hard to find where the chromosome was. The problem with Jim was that he was interested in lung disease. And he had gotten this idea that there was a virus, a DNA virus that was causing the lung disease. And he thought maybe that the DNA of the virus. . . Cause some of the retroviruses and other DNA viruses, they actually incorporate into the DNA. Oh okay. So he though maybe it might and then he wanted to know what was going. . . First of to show that it did incorporate into the DNA and there was some preliminary evidence from other studies looking at. . . Cells that were transformed by this virus, by this virus that it had, it was carried along with the human cells in the nucleus. But the problem was that it was. . . The virus for one thing, we did labels and we had a piece of DNA that we thought was something—that we needed to integrate because it integrated into this DNA of the transformed cell. And we did everything but. . . I don't think we ever got a human cell. . . But the point was that he thought that this virus would be implicated in a lung disease called COPD, which was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which is partially emphysema and partially obstruction of the lungs. Oh okay. That smokers get, but not all smokers, and that was his. . . Background noise. Interesting. And I worked on that for many many years and we never got to the point where we could actually. . . We looked at COPD patients and people with normal lungs, and this is why tissue banks were important. They would have normal lungs and also lungs of people other diseases, and compare them and see if the virus was present. And there was some evidence that there was a preponderance in the one with COPD that was never that clear and the thing to do was to try to localize in on the chromosomes. But by the time I sort of gave up, we were— there was a new technique called the polymerase chain reaction, that won noble prize for, what was his name. . . The same year that Mike Smith got his noble prize. . . was a way of amplifying the DNA in the dish and then you'd have the. . . If you could do that not in a dish, in sort of in vitro, but do it right on the chromosomes, then it would amplify and then you'd. . . That'd be a big deal. And then you'd get something like the polytene chromosomes. And a couple of people were successful, but I remember our lab trying it and we could never get it to work. And it sort of went by the wayside. Laughs. That seems like a lot of work. Laughs. Sorry about my. . . We published a lot of papers. So this work I’m assuming, your work at UBC and in the labs, that carried you all the way through until retirement? Yes. So when I went to work for Jim Hogg he was at St. Paul’s and St. Paul’s—he was the head of what’s called Pulmonary Research Centre. They had developed the centre especially for him, he was from Montreal. And he said he would come here and they had this centre started off as maybe two labs in a remote area of the hospital and it gradually became to be the old, I don’t know, Pharmacology lab or something. They took over and they renovated it. and they expanded with labs on the side. And this is in the old part of the original old St. Paul’s, the sisters had built. And then he expanded again and now it’s called the Heart and Lung Research Institute. A heart person came along and they collaborated and it’s grown quite a bit bigger now. And there was always talk ever since, they were saying they were going to move St. Paul’s from the downtown site to the offsite, that they would build a new, bigger, and better institute, but it still hasn’t come about. The hospital is still there. Laughs. And can I ask when did you meet Ron along this time? Well Ron came along Laughs. when I was in Gordon Tener’s lab. And in Gordon Tener’s lab when I got there, there was a post-doc, there were actually two post-docs. And Allen Delaney had just come two years earlier and there were at that point two PhD students—no there were three PhD students. Anyway I got to know Allen quite well and we used to go cross-country skiing with him. And he was a cyclist and cycled and he would tune up my bike and things along. And Allen was at that point not married to, but might as well be married, to Ron’s sister. They had come out together from Montreal together. And. . . I think I was about 30 or so when I met Ron, I can’t remember the first time. I think. . . yeah Ron was visiting and he. . .can’t—I don’t think Ron even remembers. He wanted to do something in the dark room and I, because of the in situ hybridization, I’d have to go into the dark room and we had cameras, and with the radioactivity we put photographic film on top of the slides and that’s how we, you know, the radioactive particle would develop, I mean would excite the film and you would develop it like you do a negative and you see the dots. Oh neat. And so the department had a photo lab and people did different things like take pictures, whatever else. So he had to do something for Trisha or something, it had to do with a photograph or something. And so that’s how I met him. And he came out and. . .came and I don’t know what did you do in that photo lab, I was telling Kyla that’s where I first met you. Oh Trisha was doing something for her school prep and she wanted a hand copying something. And Gordon had a copy— Yeah I had a copy stand in the darkroom. Copy stand in the lab that I could use, so I was doing that. I think that was the first time I met him. And then a couple of years later, or a year later, Trisha and Allen cross-country skied, but they didn’t downhill ski. And I down hill skied and by then you were—you had come to Vancouver. He was at Ryerson in Toronto and then he came to Vancouver and he was living with his brother. And another sister, an older sister, Pam and her husband and an English couple who was a post-doc at UBC and Ron used to skiing in their little Honda Civic. And when Trisha said that, told him I used to go skiing in the car that wasn’t bigger than a Honda Civic she said, You’ve met Ron right? And my brother, he’s interested in going. So we went skiing a couple of times together. I remember the time your dad came too once and I locked myself out of the car. Laughs. Had to pick their way through the car. It was embarrassing. Laughs. So Ron what kind of lab work were you doing or what’s your background in terms of— Well I wasn’t involved in science at all. Laughs. Oh you weren’t? Oh okay. Laughs. Yeah. He was involved in. . . No I studied photography at Ryerson. Oh I see. So when I met her I was working at a photo lab here. Hence the darkroom. Right. Okay now that makes sense. Okay. Right, right. But then eventually I got into an offshoot—more of a scientific offshoot of that in what’s called photogrammetry, which is basically making maps using aerial photographs. Oh okay, wow. Anyway so. . .We got together. How many years did we live together? We’ve been together 35-6 years, I think. And when we met, when we. . . Somewhere along the way when Trish and Allen were still single or unmarried, they’d been living for about 13 years together by then or so. She said, Well do you think we’ll get married? And we said, Well when the oldest of us reaches 65. Because there are some incentive to get married. There was a tax advantage to be married. Laughs. At 65? At 65. Really? Kyla and Ron laugh. But they’ve since got rid of that. Laughs. So that was what we were planning on. That’s so pragmatic. It was more of a joke. Laughs. But then Trisha. . . See Allen was always, they were reticent about having kids because he worked in the lab and was radiated and whatever else and had used a lot of carcinogens and things, but in the end they decided that they were going to have kids. And about the same time, well she was trying for a couple of years to have kids. And about the time she got pregnant or just before that, Allen’s boss that he was working for, he was working for a. . .you wouldn’t call him population geneticist? Medical epidemiologist. Oh okay. And he was moving his old lab to Salt Lake City and so she had to get married to get a job there. Or she wanted to or you know— No but she wasn’t allowed to work— But she was pregnant too and she had the baby so they got married and I think just— No she wasn’t pregnant when they moved, was she? Weren’t they? Oh maybe. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter anyway. Laughs. Oh I don’t know. At a specific time they had to go somewhere because she had taken some kind of fertility pill or something. And anyway so they got married before they were 65 and that left us sort of going. . .Grits teeth. Laughs. We didn’t get married ‘til how many years later? Seven years ago? No. Mmm we got married twelve years ago, 2004. Oh, okay. Oh we got married because my parents had died, his mother has died, his father was still alive. But he was not healthy. He wasn’t healthy and we needed a pick up of some kind. We thought we could use a good party. I really like your guys’ thinking. Everybody laughs. I think: party, 65, tax incentive. . .Laughs. No, everything has worked out. And I think my career is just who I knew and being the right place at the right time, I don’t think I made too much effort in promoting my career. But you worked hard. Yeah sounds like you worked really hard. I worked at what I liked to do. But teaching got to be a little bit. . . I wasn’t getting into the tutorials after awhile. So you guys have stayed in Vancouver pretty much the entire time. Mhm. Wow. And have you— Well Ron’s glad to be in one place. His family moved all over the place before that. Because they were from Vancouver, well I shouldn’t say from Vancouver, when he was born he was in Vancouver. They moved right across the country. Winnipeg. Montreal, Toronto. And Montreal, Toronto. And before I was born they lived in Nelson, Kamloops, Kelowna, Vernon, West Van. Oh wow. South Van. Back in the fifties, when going from West Vancouver to Vancouver or South Vancouver was a bigger journey than it was today. Yeah. So Vancouver I guess was like a welcome destination. Mhm. For me it was coming home because my three sisters were already—oh two sisters were back. One brother was here. My parents when they retired, they moved back. Nice. Moved back to the Okanagan. To the Okanagan yeah. And what about your parents? Did they stay in Steveston for the rest of their lives? Mhm, yeah. Yeah they stayed in Steveston. In the same house. Well, no two times—three houses. We were at Scotch and Gary Street, and then they went next door when my brother built a house for hem. And next door because my father’s problems with walking. And sorry, the location of that house, the last third house that your brother had built, was where? It’s Garry and what was Fifth Avenue. It’s sort of a lane now? It’s a right of way, yeah. Oh I should mention, my father did write some books. I forgot about that. Oh. They’re in Japanese, unfortunately. We were trying to— Oh really? We were trying to get them translated. And there have been efforts to translate them. Do you know Jim Kojima? Oh yeah. I’ve interviewed him for this project. He was the last person who tried. And I was supposed to help get funding for it, but we didn’t get through. He was interested in getting funding from the 150th thing they had for— Canada’s 150th Anniversary. Yeah. There’s some grant money. But then in the end it turned out that the translations were exactly in the category of community supported project, so they weren’t interested. And that’s where I learnt about Landscapes of Injustice when I was talking to the people that were helping us do the application. Well you should look into Landscapes of Injustice, and I said, Well maybe once I get my breath back. But this is history of, I guess it’s mostly the Japanese, Japanese Canadians in the fishing industry, in, on the West Coast. That’s so cool. And about four little sections have been translated in this book by the I think Asian Studies in UBC. Okay, yeah. Before Jim asked us about getting it translated, asking us if we were interested in joining him. My family decided that, more my niece than anybody else who doesn’t read any Japanese or speak any Japanese, and she was involved in the fishing industry in that she fished with her husband and she worked for some fishing groups. Various fishing support groups. Yeah and she wanted to know some of the background. And she had read the little excerpts in here and said that she would like to get it translated. So she was the impetus and there were two people, a former librarian at the Asian Studies Library, Mr. Gonnami, who was then retired. And he was, always been interested in my father’s books and he’s read them. And he said he would be interested and his English was reasonable, but he wasn’t a native speaker. And then another fellow whose English was even less proficient said he would help because he was a member of the community that he’d grown up with. He was a bit younger than dad, quite a bit younger, I guess he’s ten years older than me. And said he would help and so we met with Leslie and my brother said he would be willing to help because the oldest brother worked for Canada Fish for most of his life and he knew the industry and new people in it and the—what goes into fishing and all the. . . And he knew a little bit more history than my dad. So what we mistakenly did was—Mr. Gonnami, there’s five chapters in the book, and Mr. Gonnami said he was willing to dig a couple of chapters and Mr. what’s his name? Mizuta. Mizuta said that he would take one chapter. And unfortunately I don’t know why it was decided this way, Mr. Mizuta took the first chapter and Mr. Gonnami, he said he’d do chapter two and three. And since Mr. Gonnami had taken the larger lump, I said I’ll work with him and my brother said he’d work with Mr. Mizuta. Now my brother’s Japanese is even worse than mine. And he doesn’t read any of it, he reads probably minimum, not reads but what I do. I shouldn’t boast but I went to language school when we were in elementary school. And Mr. Mizuta was actually one of the teachers. And then when I went to UBC, you had to take language. I took French, I think, I took French for two years. But then I thought. Well I’d like to learn more Japanese. So I took Japanese and they wouldn’t put you in the first year, first year Japanese, you had to take second year Japanese. And because I knew the hiragana, the katakana and so I took one year of that and learned, I don’t know, several thousand characters, but you know if you don’t use it all the time. So I know the basic, like the days of the week, the numbering system, I know what female, girl, boy, mother father—that sort of thing. But anything complicated I’d have to—but I’ve learned a little bit more. But anyway, to make the story short, Mr. Gonnami started writing. He got chapter, parts of chapter one down. He didn’t—I would go back and I would be working on this, and I would go and ask him questions about this and why was it this way and a lot of it in the end turned out that a lot of it he’d written, he’d read the whole thing already, it was based on what was said in chapter one. And I said, Well okay let’s go back to chapter one. Well Mr. Mizuta was having a terrible time. His translations weren’t very good, you could hardly understand them. But then he read the Japanese hoping that my brother would understand the Japanese, but my brother wasn’t any good at that. So they were left high and dry and I. . . Mr. Gonnami’s was okay, but there’s some things I actually had to go back and that’s where I learned Japanese. I was thinking, I don’t understand this, maybe I’ll go back to the original Japanese. I got a very good Japanese dictionary, you know how the characters are formed and how you look up compounds and things like that. Yeah, yeah. Well it took me ages to do. One sentence, it took me about. . .Laughs. I could imagine. A couple of days. Laughs. I should show you. Pulls out the book. And so. . .I don’t think I have it, but anyway. And so this is the translated. . . Those were the little bits translated. The other thing that helped was Mr. Gonnami with his group had translated the contents. Table of contents. Oh okay. So that helped quite a bit. So there’s four little excerpts from there, they’re not even the full chapters. And I think one of them is in part of Mr. Gonnami’s translation. Others are scattered throughout the book. Flips pages. So it sounds like your father kept himself quite busy. Well after he retired from fishing, I think he—well I shouldn’t say that. My father used to write for two Japanese newspapers. Oh really? They’re local ones. The Continental Times one was called, the other one was called something like the New Canadian. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he would write these short little stories. Oh that’s neat. And he used to read them to us sometimes. And they were hilarious. Laughs. But we didn’t read Japanese, but that’s what’s compiled in this second, it was sort of the compilation of short stories, so that would be interesting to do them. I wonder if you can find them because the BC Archives has microfiche of all the New Canadian publications. I’m sure your dad’s stuff is. . . No the first one might be but that one I don’t— Not this one, the second one, yeah. No. I think the first one he donated several copies to the library and I think they were even going to transfer the copyright to the library but it never got done. I guess dad must’ve died or something before then. My father—That was published in ’76, I think. And he had a stroke in about ’80, I think? The year after we came back. No ’77 or ’78 or 9, it was just after Japan, wasn’t it? So ’79. Yeah, but this one he compiled from all these little newspaper stories he had after he had—it took him quite a few years because he was pretty depressed for a long time, but this probably helped him get out of his depression after his stroke. So he lost any control of his left hand and his right hand and right leg was a little bit of a problem. And my brother bought him a Japanese—it wasn’t a— Word processor. Word processor. You know where you put in— Yeah. And then he re-did this on these stories. So he worked on that. So he was always interested and I don’t think he had much formal training in Japanese. I mean he was twelve years old when he came here. I think he went to Japanese School for a few years, but then he had to go fishing. But whereas my mother went to grade twelve in Japan and they would have these arguments, you know? Who was right about what character and this and that. Laughs. And then they’d go to the dictionary and my dad says, See I’m right! Laughs. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, like your trip to Japan in the seventies, was that the first time that you and your family had gone back to Japan together? No. Um well together, yes. My dad had business dealings because he had shares in a company called, what’s it called? Was it called Nikkei. . . Nikka. Nikka. It was the fishing industry supply business. So nets, anything to do with fishing. Hardware. And he went back to the first Japanese manufacturers to find out what was available and things like that. So he’d gone back, I’m sure he went back three or four times. And he was also interested in here in exporting—getting herring roe and exporting it to Japan. So first of all he had to get a license to get herring roe and so there’s this, all this correspondence about—with Ottawa—about getting at the herring roe license and they finally did get it. And I don’t know if he ever exported anything, but they had a company in my uncle’s name and they did make herring, I know that. So he had gone many times and this was the first time I went to—no—well I couldn’t say I’ve been in Japan before, when I was in Europe I went to Southeast Asia and I did stay in the Tokyo airport for a transfer. Laughs. But it was the first time I’d been to visit Japan with my mom. And as I said my mum, it was forty years or so that she hadn’t been there. Wow. And what was that like to go back with your family? It was fun. It was sort of different in that we were going to my mother’s cousin’s place and they took care of us and they lived in the old style with tatami floors and the kitchen, the kitchen at least didn’t have a dirt floor. It had had a wooden floor, but you know how they’re—I don’t know if you’ve seen these old Japanese places, but the kitchen is really small— That’s like my— There’s no stove, there’s just a little burner. No that’s like my grandfather’s house. Yeah. Ours is. . .built just after the war so it still has sliding paper doors. Mhm yeah, yeah. Tatami mats and the genkan is there, but the kitchen is quite small. And we have a tiny, tiny stove and then like a sink. And its not like a dirt floor, but it’s almost like a stone type thing and they’ve had to—when my grandmother was still alive, they finally bought like a toaster oven and stuff like that to put it into and because there wasn’t a lot of room. All of their appliances had to be really small. Yeah, yeah. So your cousin’s house was kind of like that? It was. I think the living area was always big. We slept the five of us and there was lots of room. Of course I think they may have—the living area there was a sleeping area. And I think because there was a hibachi in the middle of the floor of the living area, so somebody had to sleep on the other side. But they were, bring out their whatevers and. . . But they still had an outhouse, they had an ofuro and it was still wood burning. Wow. But other people had flushed toilets because we visited a family in Osaka and they had flushed toilets. And even in the village there was somebody who had a gas fuelled ofuro and tub, you know? Because a lot of the hotels had that sort of type of tub. And we stayed with them and we went—there was a temple area called Koya-san that my mother remembered climbing up to when she was a school kid. Except this time we got driven up— Laughs. And visited that and then we took a trip to—took a disastrous trip to Kyoto when it was the viewing of the autumn flowers, I mean autumn leaves. There was a mum show, I think in Osaka, and then we went to Kyoto and I don’t know why my parents didn’t know this, but all the hotels were booked out and we couldn’t find a place to stay. Finally a kind old woman said, Well it’s a little bit out of place, but you can take a taxi to one of the starts of the viewing of the colour in the mountains. It was an old yokan and it was quite romantic, actually. It had this huge room with. . .I slept in that corner and there’s lots of room, I couldn’t even see my parents and there was a thing there. And they had a big bath thing, ofuro. And luckily we got treated to a nice meal. Not that the meals weren’t good. And then we did a tour of. . .did we fly? I think we must’ve flown to Nagasaki and then took a tour bus. My dad had toured Nagasaki and this was all part of the tour so you had all your hotel reservations. But the tour went through. . .what’s the one in the middle of Kyushu? I can’t remember. There’s a castle there and my dad had a friend there and that’s why we went to visit. Anyway, from there we went to—there’s a volcano outside. . . too many years. . . In Kagoshima? No, no it’s north of there. And they were talking about building the bridges across to. . .what’s the next island? Shikoku? It erupts every now and then and we were there for it. Unfortunately it erupted, you couldn’t see it, it was just— Moves her hands up. It’s near Bepu, the name of the mountain. I think I know the one that you’re talking about. Yeah. And from there we went across to Shikoku as part of the tour still, but the tour went off and my father wanted to visit an old friend who was a teacher, a school teacher, Japanese school teacher in Steveston before the war. Takashima, I think. And so we went to visit him. And he lived in. . . he was just north of Nagahama. Nagahama was right on the seashore. Went to visit him and he had a small farm and it was orange groves. And it was November and it was orange season. Mikan season. So we got right off the tree and I thought, Boy these do taste different. And Wakayama is known for oranges, too. The mandarin oranges. And then we came back on the shinkansen, I think, came across the shinkansen back to Mio. So how was it for your mom to go back because you said she hadn’t been back in so long. Was she happy or you said she was quite shocked by how much had changed overtime? Mhm, mhm oh no, no she was happy to be back and seeing people that she knew that were grown up now or different. At least older. And see I had come back from Europe and I was quite, was well versed in train systems and platforms, whereas my dad only went on business and he’d be picked up at the airport and whatever else and he didn’t know the train system. From taxi, to taxi, yeah. And even in those days, some of those signs were in English. Not all of them, my dad would read the sign and I would say, Okay, this way, that way. So when we’re on the trains I was fine with them. I mean they were glad I was there until we met the tour. And even going to—I think we were coming back from there when we went to—well we did go to Kyoto and we did visit all the temples and things when we were there in Kyoto. And then we came back to Tokyo and went to, this is all with trains, so when we went to Kamakura to visit and I was going to say something about that too. I think there was some train issue that needed clarifying. Yeah. There’s so much to navigate with those trains. And then we went to Yokohama. Dad was invited to Yokohama. There was some kind of immigration facility there. There’s a museum. Is there? Yeah. Well they were training people or they had classes for people who were going to immigrate. Oh interesting. And they wanted him to speak about it, about immigration. Except they were going to Venezuela. Yeah that’s so interesting that you mentioned that. I actually went to that facility museum a couple of years ago and I guess Yokohama was like a family day trip for my mom when she was really young and she has lots of fond memories. So she said, Oh do you think we can go? So I said, Yeah, yeah of course! The focus of the museum was an emigration museum and they showed where various Japanese people had gone to and South America was a huge focus. Yeah. Mhm. Like I knew a little bit about Brazil and I was a little bit familiar with that, but then all the other areas of South America too. I was really shocked. Because I don’t know, we’re in Canada and you know you have this Steveston and Richmond and whatnot, but it was really interesting. Yeah I was wondering what they got out of my father because he had immigrated in the early 1900’s and then he was going to Canada and then there was internment. But anyway, I think they asked questions and even with my limited Japanese I could tell that they were going down to the nitty gritty of making connections and I hope they knew the language. So in your dad’s speech then, I guess it would be—I would think it’d be interesting to kind of hear your dad speak about his experiences or what advice he would give. Well I think he kept it more general because he realized that he was, you know, he immigrated at a different time and that things had changed and it was a different place. What he had experienced probably wouldn’t work. But I think he probably did bring out problems with racism. With the complications just of immigrating. I can’t remember that much because I was more fascinated at the questions they were asking him than if he could answer them. For your father, like you said, the time that he moved to Canada was quite a heightened environment toward anti-Japanese sentiments. Did you ever see any racism yourself when you moved back to Steveston growing up? Not coming back to Steveston. Along the way there were certain things that, you know, you might think were racism, but not that much. Definitely was something there. Back in Steveston, no not too much. I think the problem was there were so many Japanese. If there was something small, it didn’t really rub you that way. Maybe my older brothers felt a little bit different and probably my parents, you know, being—my mother especially could speak the language. Well definitely Tad has mentioned that, the racism that he faced. Yeah that’s certain groups. Did he mention any of that even in the talks that he gave? I don’t recall that. But you know the trouble is when they talk about things like that, they use a different language. It’s a more intellectual language and my dad, I would consider him an intellectual, although he didn’t have any schooling so I don’t think I really understood a lot of it, like simple things I would understand. Yeah, totally. I guess maybe to reflect a little bit on your life and your family history, did you —like your family didn’t really talk about the internment memories that much. Mhm. But you were quite young when everything had started, so how did you learn about your family history later on and what had happened in Steveston and in Vancouver? I think by the time we were in Westbank, when I was staring school, and I think even. . . Well no I guess it was Steveston that, I mean Westbank, that had happened, that they were sending packages back to Japan and it would come up then when we were saying, Who are you sending it to Japan? And they would say that we were moved. I guess the only real time when we—earliest time was when mum brought this doll out and said this was in place of the ohinasan and then she explained that they couldn’t—we had to move. But there wasn’t any—and I didn’t think that there was a war going on until I saw my first, actual first movie, when I was in Westbank. They took us to a theatre. And this was already 1948 or something? ’48 would I be six years old? Yeah. And the little shorts that they showed were of fighting, you know? Of warfare. And I hid behind the chair after that and it was, the movie was. . .later on when I saw these clips I think, Oh that was the daughter of something O’Grady with Debbie Reynolds in it. Laugh. Oh really? And I couldn’t crawl out of my. . . because of the little shorts they showed of the wartime and I guess they were still coming out of war and they had showed, I don’t know why. . . So I didn’t want to go to a movie after that until I came back to—I didn’t go back to a movie until I came back to Steveston. So I don’t know. That definitely, that was sort of war. And they did. . . I think my parents did mention that Japan was having a terrible time and it was explained that there was war. And I don’t know if internment came out as strongly then either that, you know, this is why we were here. But I don’t think. . . When I talk to my other friends like Ina and the other girls, I don’t think much was said in the families about that. Either we were too young and they didn’t think—they didn’t want to bring that upon us or whether they just didn’t talk about it. Definitely, you know, sitting around the dinner table with my grandparents never came around, I don’t think. It didn’t come up with your grandparents? No, I don’t think so. In terms of perhaps now looking back, how do you think your parents might’ve felt about—your parents and your grandparents because you had quite a bit of family. Mhm. All the time. All the time. How do you think they felt with regards to what had happened and just like the letters that your dad wrote? Those letters, yeah. He was going to get his gramophone back. Yeah. Yeah I think they probably, definitely felt a loss. And my grandmother sometimes would say that, Oh if we could only have this and this, you know? Because I think they lived in Japanese communities but they did what they could. They made their own shoyu and things. I don’t know where they got the beans from, they probably made a substitute and they made a lot of substitutes for things that they—you know food stuffs anyways that they couldn’t get, so. But I think the Japanese, especially when you talk to people, it sounds like a lot of my generation, like my brothers and that generation that were just born around just shortly before or around the time of the evacuation, that we don’t have any, Tad might have more ideas about it, but don’t seem to have very many memories of—there were tough times, but then you know people who were pioneers have tough times too, you just muddle through things. That there was any injustice done, you read about it now and you think, Oh yeah, there was injustice, onto them especially. I’d like to know how much my dad got back, but it sounds like maybe not much. Yeah. Was any member of your family or were you part of the Redress Settlement that happened later on? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. I wasn’t an active part of it, I just signed my name and I said— Oh as a support, yeah. And I’m just curious only because you worked with him, did David Suzuki ever talk about any of his experiences? Yeah, oh yeah. Well he was bitter about it. Right. Yeah. And see the thing is he is the same age as Joanne, I mean, Joanne is his first wife and she doesn’t remember that much, but his father was probably a bit more vocal and his English was good and he was probably a member of the community who was a little bit more proactive, so he might’ve got it from his father, I don’t know. Because Carl was very outspoken and he’s the one that encouraged David. We used to say, You’re a good speaker, and he said, My dad said stand in front of the mirror and try to convince yourself. I feel like I need that advice. Everyone laughs. But it seems like, I mean, was it your brother and your family who just kept these mementos along the way? Well I didn’t know about this until my parents had died. Oh no—the first time it came up was—I have a list of things here. When the Nikkei Centre for. . . Searches through papers. Historical artifacts for. . . Oh yeah, there was in 1998. . . They asked for an exhibit called Unearthed from Silence and it was shown all over the province and so we were digging stuff up for them. And Tad, I think it was Tad at the time. 1988, dad was. . .? He'd been dead for about three years. Yeah. Tad said, There’s this briefcase, and we looked around and there was some pictures and all of this stuff was there, we didn’t look at it very much, but there were pictures of . . .all the stuff in there of their immigration pictures, his passport from Japan, and my grandfather signing a declaration saying that he’s my son and he was trying to naturalization for him. Because my grandfather somehow automatically got naturalization because when he came there wasn’t any Government or British Columbia, I don’t know. Policies weren’t in place. Yeah, yeah. So it was under British legal thing, so he was naturalized as— British subject. British subject. British subject. And there were some papers trying to get my father under that too, but I don’t know when. It wasn’t until much later, was it, that you had citizenship in Canada? It was in the 40’s? 40’s when they started working on it, yeah. So papers like that and we got a couple —we didn’t want to overwhelm them with it so we had an example from my mother, my father, and then we had a marriage certificate from my mother. And pictures, things like that. This first book we submitted a copy to that. And then there was an old—my father in this picture is wearing a hagamo. I think it’s this one. We still had that, you know, in one of the closets, so we put that on exhibit and we actually said if you want to keep it, you can. So my brother didn’t want to have that hanging around. Sounds like your family kept actually quite a bit. Oh my father was a, well you know, he wrote or whatever and he did. And my mother did. . .well not as much though, but she. . . Not that they hoarded things, but things that would be of interest. Yeah. Because I’m thinking, you know, initially I had asked like what they brought along with them, but seems like they kept certain key pieces always along with them. Yeah because they weren’t allowed to take very much with them when they were interned. So very, very little. No. Like even just the garment that you just showed, that’s, I don’t know. Though some families that I’ve interviewed have brought along with them things that you would never think would be of importance. Like you’d think, Yeah you should bring that, but one family I interviewed, I said, Oh what did your family bring? and she points behind me in the room that we’re in and she goes, Do you see that sewing machine? My mother lugged that around to three different camps. And the thing is like, it’s a full Singer Sewing Machine. Yeah. Huge, yeah. And I said, Do you know how that was moved around? She says, I have no idea, but we still have it, and she’s like, We’ve got trunks. Yeah I think like Ruby’s mother, the sewing machine they had in the house is an old original one that they have. Wow. Whereas my mother bought a new sewing machine when she got back. Laughs. Because I learned on it and I sewed on it and it was a more modern one. Yeah, yeah. But my dad did keep everything. Like this is what they had to submit to the Custodian of. . . A company that they had shares in and things like that, you know, they had to declare their assets and liabilities or whatever I guess so they can assess the worth of it and all that. Yeah, of course. He kept a lot of these things. I don’t know to what end. What is this certificate? I think it’s for. . . River Fish Company Limited. Hm. I think it’s probably their shares or something. And there’s names of people who had shares and how much they owed and all this stuff. And in the end I think my dad had to pay some money to them. Wow. Would it be okay if I took photos of the letters? Oh yeah. Yeah because you don’t see a lot of people who keep breakdowns of their assets and that’s exactly what we’re interested in. You scanned some of those things, haven’t you already? No I scanned my grandfather’s immigration things. And in the immigration on the actual form after that they had to get licenses every year and the name of the boat and the license of your year is marked on it. So the actual papers is sort of crumbling, but then you can see that since this thing, he’s had this boat named this. That’s so cool. So whatever you need to take pictures of you can organize it in some fashion. Oh thank you. Well I guess to maybe finish up. . .in terms of your own personal opinion, what are your thoughts on everything that happened, like the internment, the uprooting, and the dispossession, what are your own personal thoughts? Yeah I think as a person growing up then it wasn’t all that bad. Actually I don’t know. When I think about the group that I’m with, if we had lived in Steveston all our lives. We probably would have all dispersed and we’d not ever get together again. So there is a bit of community forming in that we did get together again at the end and then continued to do so. It could also be that since they’ve been shuttled around so much they didn’t want to move anymore, but I don’t have any negative feelings about that at all. I mean, well everything has turned out. I can’t say that. . . I would be any better off. I probably wouldn’t be if they had lived here all their lives, had that property and it would have made a stronger family, you know? Of course I say that, but my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, they always needed help so they’re always close by, but I have a lot stronger tie with them. Whereas Ron, your maternal grandmother. . . I didn’t really have close ties because we moved around so much. Just with my siblings, really ,and my parents. So your family was more just small, tight knit. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Yeah and I think the bonds with my cousins is greater too because even in internment my uncle, the one—the brother next to my dad, his family was never in the same vicinity with us. But we lived in the Slocan—when we were in the Slocan Valley we went to visit them and they lived in Sandon, which I think looking at the map today there wasn’t a major way of getting there, there was probably a walking road to Sandon, I’m not sure. But I remember visiting them. Them visiting us in Alberta, I don’t know where they were. But because of that I know them a lot better than Ron would know his cousins. Right. Just by comparison to somebody else I know that has cousins and we do know who they are, but they’re not as close. I guess with my, on my mother’s side, Emy the girl, my cousin who is just a bit older than I am. We were closer to her because her mother—they were a funny family. Can’t explain it but her. . .I think Emy was born here. Because she was born in November and I’m born in January and I think they were at that point even given a choice to go back to Japan and I think her mother went back to Japan, I don’t know about the father, but I would assume that the father went back. The mother went back to Japan and they came back when we were in Kaslo. Oh no they couldn’t have come back when we were at Kaslo because that would have been the same year. That seems a little early. Yeah. Yeah so they must’ve gone back. . .I think because I know she went back to Japan maybe the year we went to. . . They didn’t go back after the war when they were— Oh maybe it was the time when you had to go East of the Rockies or you can go back to Japan. I think that was it. Yeah I think that was— 1945-1946. Yeah and her mother went back to Japan with Emy and because we were definitely in Kaslo, was wondering, I think she was even in Lemon Creek for a little bit and then they came back when we were in Westbank so I guess somehow they must’ve been able to come back from Japan. That would’ve been ’47, around ’47, ’48. Because I know that because we went to visit them in Penticton and so I’ve got a closer tie with her. We lived in Scotch Pond, my grandmother had one of the units that the Gulf of Georgia had because my dad was there and he was well respected by the cannery I guess. So she lived with my grandmother and my mother and my aunt and uncle and so we were quite close and so even now I guess she’s got family, busy, things like that. She’s one of my cousins on my mother’s side. Really the only real cousin. The other ones are half cousins because her mother married again and had kids, but. . . So, you know, sort of a closer knit with cousins that you wouldn’t normally have because of that. That circumstances. . . Yeah. . . And then you have this core group of friends now that you’ve stayed in touch with all these years. So how many of you are there in total? Well the core group I guess there’s about eight, aren’t there? Maybe ten. There was ten. Well there were twelve, but two have died. Two died? Mary-Lou and. . . No that’s Sandra and that’s a different group. See I have a problem with groups, it’s not that I socialize a lot. . . Laughs. But I don’t socialize, I’m an introvert actually. There’s a group that I graduated from school with, but to that group are added two people who didn’t graduate with us. I’m just trying to think who is it. Hiroko— No, no, no, no. There’s one person, it’s Chiyo was. . . a lot of the girls I graduated with, I’d say 40% became teachers, elementary school teachers. Boys, did they ever become teachers? I don’t know. Might have been one or two teachers. But predominantly the girls did. And in university they met Chiyo and Chiyo Homma, her father was—her grandfather actually was one of those immigrants who wanted to get, what’s the word when you say you get to vote? Enfranchisement. Yeah. Oh his case is famous! Yeah and he’s the grandfather. Homma, oh wow! And we know them as a family too because of my aunt is. . . No my aunt’s sisters is married to one of the Homma brothers. Anyway so she’s joined our group. So she wasn’t one that graduated with us. And they used to live in Steveston too, obviously. But we didn’t know her until we went to university. So there’s ten in that group, there’s. . .most of us live in Vancouver, Richmond or Burnaby. There’s one who lives on Mayne Island and then there’s one, Tomoye lives in Rutland, that’s Kelowna I guess now. Sadaiyo is one of the ones that came. . .Sadaiyo and Mika, Mika is in our group but she’s one of the ones with the families went back to Japan. Oh I think Ina mentioned Mika. Yeah. Sadaiyo is another one. And Sadaiyo lives in Toronto, but she’s the one with the family that came back. But they all came back to Steveston and Mika from about when we were about grade five I think they came back. Because I remember her. And they had a special class that they went and there were some Chinese fellows and then there was the Japanese ones, I think that made up the class. Mrs. Moreside was the teacher and she was really a nice, gentle teacher and they were sort of English as a second language type of class. And they more or less caught up. Mika I think, she’s a year older than I am, but she graduated with us. And so did Sadaiyo, I think Sadaiyo is a year older than us too. And there’s one member, Joyce, I don’t know where they lived in Steveston but when the choice was made to go east of the Rockies their family went east to I don’t know Toronto or somewhere similar to that and then came back. So she came back a little bit later because I didn’t know her until—of course she might’ve lived somewhere else in Richmond, she didn’t live in Steveston, but by the time we were going to high school she had come back. And in terms of the friends who have been through similar things, do they share similar opinions as you do in terms of effects? I think so, yeah, I think so. I think they’re not—none of them has any grudge or feels that they’ve been wrong done, I don’t think they do. It was an injustice, but then it’s wartime, what are you going to do? It may be inexcusable, but governments do what they have to do I guess at that time, so. . . Sad enough. But the fact that we all didn’t suffer too greatly, we’re all pretty affluent, Ron would say too affluent. Laughs. Well if you want to take pictures, why don’t you get set up. Yeah, well— I don’t know where all the documents went to, but this, I think is the one that you were interested in. For sure. Well thank you so much for sitting down, we did a good almost three hours just straight talking. Laughs.So thank you so much for taking the time to do that. Well I hope you can make some sense out of it. Oh for sure yeah. I’ll just turn off the audio and that way we can take pictures.